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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"Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting."
"In doing nothing men learn to do evil."
"...the evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the Black people."
"No greater wrong can ever be done than to put a good man at the mercy of a bad, while telling him not to defend himself or his fellows; in no way can the success of evil be made surer or quicker."
"Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it."
"Good and evil both increase at compound interest."
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, "Who is destroying the world?" You are."
"Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good."
"The atheists are for the most part imprudent and misguided scholars who reason badly who, not being able to understand the Creation, the origin of evil, and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypothesis the eternity of things and of inevitability."
"To read too many books is harmful."
"The cross is offensive because it directly confronts the evils which dominate so much of this world."
"If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?"
"Death is an evil; the gods have so judged; had it been good, they would die."
"The contest is not between us and them, but between good and evil, and if those who would fight evil adopt the ways of evil, evil wins."
"In politics evils should be remedied not revenged."
"Fear not of evil.. Everyday dem flesh it grow old Changes of the time take the toll."
"It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts."
"An armed republic submits less easily to the rule of one of its citizens than a republic armed by foreign forces. Rome and Sparta were for many centuries well armed and free. The Swiss are well armed and enjoy great freedom. Among other evils caused by being disarmed, it renders you contemptible. It is not reasonable to suppose that one who is armed will obey willingly one who is unarmed; or that any unarmed man will remain safe among armed servants."
"I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law."
"The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with."
