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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"All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy or by a free market, but by government intervention into the economy."
"There is some soul of goodness in things evil, Would men observingly distill it out."
"Faith is, necessary to explain anything, and to reconcile the foreknowledge of God with human evil."
"You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act."
"Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived."
"Evil is nourished and grows by concealment."
"Let us confess it: evil strides the world."
"The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack."
"Hindsight is an exact science. Hold fast to your dreams, for it dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened."
"It is extreme evil to depart from the company of the living before you die."
"January, month of empty pockets! let us endure this evil month, anxious as a theatrical producer's forehead."
"No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed."
"Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! I've heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis."
"Reflection is not the evil; but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous, and leads in the end to a retrograde movement."
"It is immoral to see evil and not act on it."
"If faith in ourselves had been more extensively taught and practiced, I am sure a very large portion of the evils and miseries that we have would have vanished."
"We can never lose what is really ours. Who can lose his being? Who can lose his very existence? If I am good, it is the existence first, and then that becomes colored with the quality of goodness. If I am evil, it is the existence first, and that becomes colored with the quality of badness. That existence is first, last, and always; it is never lost but ever present."
"Know mankind well, don't degrade every man as evil, and don't exalt every man thinking he is good. He who cannot discover himself; cannot discover the world."
"They are the carrion birds of humanity...[speaking of the Jews] are a state within a state. They are certainly not real citizens...The evils of Jews do not stem from individuals but from the fundamental nature of these people."
"Real non-co-operation is non-co-operation with evil and not with the evil-doer."
