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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"Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities."
"I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it."
"To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it."
"Degrees do not matter... one does not bargain about inches of evil."
"So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. . . . When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him by force. It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own."
"You'll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well."
"Kant is the most evil man in mankind's history."
"Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life."
"I refuse to apologize for my ability -- I refuse to apologize for my success -- I refuse to apologize for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it."
"A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue."
"You have no choice about your capacity to feel that something is good for you or evil, but what you will consider good or evil, what will give you joy or pain, what you will love or hate, desire or fear, depends on your standard of value."
"Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of "evil," regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are "extreme" - i.e., consistent)."
"I am unwilling to be wholly good—and please don't regard me as wholly evil!"
"Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him."
"Man provides his own goods and his own evils, neither God nor the Devil has anything to do with it."
"By giving too much importance to fine actions one may end by paying an indirect but powerful tribute to evil, because in so doing one implies that such fine actions are only valuable because they are rare, and that malice or indifference are far more common motives in the actions of men."
"Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils."
"A thing may look specious in theory, and yet be ruinous in practice; a thing may look evil in theory, and yet be in practice excellent."
"Evil can be condoned only if in the beyond it is compensated by good and god himself needs immortality to vindicate his ways to man."
"I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication."
