Evil quotes

Evil

5.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

5.3K quotes

Explore further

Browse quotes that often appear alongside evil — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.

Quote collection

Evil quotes (page 59 of 265)

Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.

Kurt Vonnegut Novelist, Satirist
Evil

"There is no good reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia."

Read quote 6 likes
Kurt Vonnegut Novelist, Satirist
Evil

"Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side."

Read quote 6 likes
Hugo Black Justice
Evil

"What finally emerges from the 'clear and present danger' cases is a working principle that the substantive evil must be extremely serious and the degree of imminence extremely high before utterances can be punished...It must be taken as a command of the broadest scope that explicit language, read in the context of a liberty-loving society, will allow."

Read quote 6 likes
Daisaku Ikeda Buddhist Leader, Author
Evil

"Likewise, education can direct people toward good or evil ends. When education is based on a fundamentally distorted worldview, the results are horrific."

Read quote 5 likes
Paulo Coelho Writer
Evil

"About the nature of human beings. I discovered that confronted by temptation, we will always fall. Given the right circumstances, every human being on this earth would be willing to commit evil."

Read quote 5 likes
Plato Philosopher
Evil

"The greatest penalty of evil-doing is to grow into the likeness of a bad man."

Read quote 5 likes
Plato Philosopher
Evil

"There is yet something remaining for the dead, and some far better thing for the good than for the evil."

Read quote 5 likes
Dan Brown Author
Evil

"...the word occult, despite conjuring images of devil worship, actually means ‘hidden’ or ‘obscured.’ In times of religious oppression, knowledge that was counterdoctrinal had to be kept hidden or ‘occult,’ and because the church felt threatened by this, they redefined anything ‘occult’ as evil, and the prejudice survived."

Read quote 5 likes
Evil

"A mind that is positive cannot be controlled. For the purposes of occult dominion, minds must therefore be rendered passive and negative in order that control may be achieved. Minds consciously working to a definite end are a power, and power can oppose power for good or for evil. The scheme for world dominion might be doomed by the recognition of this principle alone, but, as it is unfortunately unrecognized, it remains unchallenged."

Read quote 5 likes
Elbert Hubbard Writer, Publisher
Evil

"When you once attribute effects to the will of a personal God, you have let in a lot of little gods and evils - then sprites, fairies, dryads, naiads, witches, ghosts and goblins, for your imagination is reeling, riotous, drunk, afloat on the flotsam of superstition. What you know then doesn't count. You just believe, and the more your believe the more do you plume yourself that fear and faith are superior to science and seeing."

Read quote 5 likes
Emile Zola Novelist
Evil

"How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!"

Read quote 5 likes
Epictetus Philosopher
Evil

"Two principles we should always have ready — that there is nothing good or evil save in the will; and that we are not to lead events, but to follow them."

Read quote 5 likes
Euripides Playwright
Evil

"Doth some one say that there be gods above? There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool, Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you. Look at the facts themselves, yielding my words, No undue credence: for I say that kings kill, rob, break oaths, lay cities waste by fraud, And doing thus are happier than those, Who live calm pious lives day after day. All divinity is built-up from our good and evil luck."

Read quote 5 likes
Carl Jung Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst
Evil

"Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole."

Read quote 5 likes
Dave Chappelle Comedian, Actor, Writer
Evil

"I was 23. When you're 23, your concern is not for the greater good of humanity. I didn't feel like I was unleashing an evil on society or anything. At the time, that's what I was into, and I did a movie about it."

Read quote 5 likes
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Theologian
Evil

"The question of why evil exists is not a theological question, for it assumes that it is possible to go behind the existence forced upon us as sinners. If we could answer it then we would not be sinners. We could make something else responsible...The theological question does not arise about the origin of evil but about the real overcoming of evil on the Cross; it ask for the forgiveness of guilt, for the reconciliation of the fallen world"

Read quote 5 likes
Charles Dickens Novelist
Evil

"But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the thing it looks upon to bless."

Read quote 5 likes