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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"There is only one perpetrator of evil on the planet: human unconsciousness. That realization is true forgiveness. With forgiveness, your victim identity dissolves, and your true power emerges--the power of Presence. Instead of blaming the darkness, you bring in the light."
"The urge to distribute wealth equally, and still more the belief that it can be brought about by political action, is the most dangerous of all popular emotions. It is the legitimation of envy, of all the deadly sins the one which a stable society based on consensus should fear the most. The monster state is a source of many evils; but it is, above all, an engine of envy."
"Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous."
"The great human problem of evil stems from the illusion of separateness. Whenever this illusion is overcome, we behave lovingly to one another."
"The aphorism "Whatever is, is right," would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence that nothing that ever was, was wrong."
"Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change."
"Evil draws men together."
"The two great movers of the human mind are the desire of good and the fear of evil."
"If God is, why is there evil? But if God is not, why is there good?"
"It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness."
"Fear not, nor be dismayed at the appearance that is darkness, at the disguise that is evil, at the empty cloak that is death, for you have picked these for your challenges. They are stones on which you choose to whet the keen edge of your spirit."
"To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity."
"How can I protect something so perfect without evil."
"I may not unnerve myself while I can struggle against evil."
"You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like: and allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power."
"As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core."
"There is no fire like passion: there is no evil and hatred."
"The tragic evils of our life are so commonly unintentional. We did not start out for that poor, cheap goal. That aim was not in our minds at all....Look to the road you are walking on. He who picks up one end of [a] stick picks up the other.He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to."
"Old Molly Means was a hag and a witch; Chile of the devil, the dark, and sitch."
"Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell."
