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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"Making the truth public is a form of justice. This is a moral universe and you've got to take account of the fact that truth and lies and goodness and evil are things that matter."
"We are fundamentally good, and evil is an aberration."
"I would hope that wherever I was I would be me. I have been influenced by some wonderful people who showed me that there is an integral relationship between faith and life at home. Evil is evil, repression is repression anywhere. And if it is not consistent with what one believes is God's will, then I would hope that one would be able to witness it, and there are wonderful people who do so in very great risks to themselves."
"The right way to requite evil, according to Jesus, is not to resist it. This saying of Christ removes the Church from the sphere of politics and law."
"War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil."
"Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all."
"Your own transformation will enable you to withdraw so completely from evil that you contribute to it by not one word, one thought, or one breath. This healing process is like recovering your soul."
"Throughout history, religious wars have always been the most brutal and cruel and merciless."
"Good never come of such evil, a happier end was not in nature to so unhappy a beginning."
"Every man, however obscure, however far removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men impressible for good, and impressible for evil, and it is in the nature of things that he cannot really improve himself without in some degree improving other men."
"I don't think of myself as an evil monster and I hope I'm not."
"Stalinism - or communism - is the only ideology Americans know how to demonise... no one knows what it is, it's just a synonym for the Empire of Evil."
"Along with Islam and Christianity, Judaism does insist that some turgid and contradictory and sometimes evil and mad texts, obviously written by fairly unexceptional humans, are in fact the word of god. I think that the indispensable condition of any intellectual liberty is the realisation that there is no such thing."
"Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil"
"We become accomplices in evil every time we seek to soothe the unslakable appetites of the crime family that sits in Pyongyang."
"Hannah Arendt in her study of totalitarianism borrowed from Immanuel Kant the concept of radical evil, of evil that's so evil that in the end it destroys itself, it's so committed to evil and it's so committed to hatred and cruelty that it becomes suicidal. My definition of it is the surplus value that's generated by totalitarianism. It means you do more violence, more cruelty than you absolutely have to to stay in power."
"The world was new each day for God so made it daily. Yet it contained within it all the evils as before, no more, no less."
"There’s only one Earth, and it’s tiny, but evil human leaders avoid problems they don’t want to resolve by giving them names which make the problems sound like they’re taking place in a different world: they make people not care about other people dying of starvation by calling the place the dying live “the third world."
"If you like poetry let it be first rate, Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith Pope (if you will though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth and Southey. Now Ellen don't be startled at the names of Shakespeare, and Byron. Both these were great Men and their works are like themselves, You will know how to chuse the good and avoid the evil, the finestpassages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting you will never wish to read them over twice."
"The twin conceptions of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics."
