Evil quotes
5.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside evil — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"One inconvenience... may attend bold and arduous attempts: frequent failure may discourage. This evil, however, is not more pernicious than the slow proficiency which is the natural consequence of too easy tasks."
"Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies."
"Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world."
"Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day is the decoration of the railroad station... There was never more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything connected with the railroads... Railroad architecture has or would have a dignity of its own if it were only left to its work."
"Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty."
"Of all the things that oppress me, this sense of the evil working of nature herself -my disgust at her barbarity -clumsiness -darkness -bitter mockery of herself -is the most desolating."
"The joys of the evil flow away like a torrent."
"Evil deeds do not prosper; the slow man catches up with the swift."
"The Negroes of America had taken the President, the press and the pulpit at their word when they spoke in broad terms of freedom and justice. But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice. To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood."
"Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love"
"Money, like any other force such as electricity, is amoral and can be used for either good or evil."
"[People] don't see that there's a great deal of a difference between nonresistance to evil and nonviolent resistance."
"[Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil."
"Music is one of the fairest and most glorious gifts of God, to which Satan is a bitter enemy; for it removes from the heart the weight of sorrow, and the fascination of evil thoughts."
"Often the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the oppressed accepts it."
"Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility."
"A trade unionist - of course I am. First, last, and all the time. How else to strike at the roots of the evils undermining the moral and physical health of women? How else grapple with the complex problems of employment, overemployment, and underemployment alike, resulting in discouraged, undernourished bodies, too tired to resist the onslaughts of disease and crime?"
"Now the Father draws us from the evil of sin to the goodness of His grace with the might of His measureless power, and He needs all the resources of His strength in order to convert sinners, more than when He was about to make heaven and earth, which He made with His own power without help from any creature. But when He is about to convert a sinner, He always needs the sinner's help. "He converts thee not without thy help," as St. Augustine says."
"But evil fortune has decreed, (The foe of mice as well as men) The royal mouse at last should bleed, Should fall ne'er to arise again."
"The man who fights for his ideals is alive."
