Evil quotes
5.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside evil — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil."
"A true repentance shuns the evil itself, more than the external suffering or the shame."
"The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works."
"Many of our miseries are merely comparative: we are often made unhappy, not by the presence of any real evil, but by the absence of some fictitious good; of something which is not required by any real want of nature, which has not in itself any power of gratification, and which neither reason nor fancy would have prompted us to wish, did we not see it in the possession of others."
"The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day."
"Evil is, good or truth misplaced."
"The devil fools with the best laid plans."
"The Word of fire burns today On the lips of our prophets in an evil age."
"But I'm glad you'll see me as I am. Above all, I wouldn't want people to think that I want to prove anything. I don't want to prove anything, I just want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself. I have that right, haven't I?"
"If half an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion. A man is good or he is evil. (Melisandre of Asshai)"
"The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself."
"Inaction, letting be, neither creating nor destroying--that is my evil. And also the knower as one without desire."
"You never want to play too vampiric or generically evil, so you look for emotions or character traits that you can relate to."
"So great and boundless is God's wisdom that he knows right well how to use evil instruments to do good."
"If you disclose your alms, even then it is well done, but if you keep them secret, and give them to the poor, then that is better still for you;?and this wipes off from you some of your evil deeds."
"I'm just deeply disappointed that once again we may have to settle for the lesser of two evils."
"The devil was the first democrat"
"This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten."
"Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good."
"Know what is evil, no matter how worshipped it may be. Let the man of sense not mistake it, even when clothed in brocade, or at times crowned in gold, because it cannot thereby hide its hypocrisy, for slavery does not lose its infamy, however noble the master."
