Albert Einstein
Physicist
"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything."
Evil quotes
Evil
5.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
William Shakespeare
Playwright, Poet
"Hell is empty and all the devils are here."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Theologian
"Silence in the face of evil is evil itself."
Saint Francis de Sales
Saint, Bishop
"Anxiety is the greatest evil that can befall a soul, except sin. God commands you to pray, but He forbids you to worry."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Theologian
"Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are."
Quote collection
Evil quotes (page 1 of 265)
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"People in their natural state are basically good. But this natural innocence,however, is corrupted by the evils of society."
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"Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him."
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"But a lie is a lie, and in itself intrinsically evil, whether it be told with good or bad intents."
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"We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell."
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"Look at the evils of the world around you and protect yourself from them. Our teachers give all the wrong messages to our youth, since they take away the natural flare from the soul. Take it from me that all knowledge is useless until it is connected with your life, because the purpose of knowledge is nothing but to show you the splendors of yourself!"
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"The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks"
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"The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved."
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"When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil."
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"We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism."
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"Being against evil doesn't make you good."
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"I would rather be a little nobody, then to be a evil somebody."
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"Constantly choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil."
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"All that was required of them (i.e. the brain-washed masses) was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice."
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"The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole goddamned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves."
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"The best form of government is that which is most likely to prevent the greatest sum of evil."
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"Move over Lucifer, I'm more ruthless, leave you toothless."
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"We always said that our struggle was not only against the British as representatives of colonialism, it was against all the evil that existed in India. The evil of the feudal system, the evil of the system based on caste, the evil of economic injustice."
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"Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil."
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"We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil."
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"Once you can express yourself, you can tell the world what you want from it. All the changes in the world, for good or evil, were first brought about by words."
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