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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"It is my greatest misfortune to be too lazy, and by the few mortifications I have already set with on that account I predict many evils in my future life. I have always the inclination to do what I ought; but by continually procrastinating for tomorrow the business of today, I insensibly delay, until at the end of one month I find myself in the same place as when I began it."
"to be choked with hate May well be of all evil chances chief."
"Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint."
"We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out."
"Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet."
"When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in."
"But evil is a cunning force. It can find the weakness in any man, even the bravest. [...] It only takes a single weak moment to let evil in."
"Ah, what a sign it is of evil life, Where death's approach is seen so terrible!"
"No evil lost is wailed when it is gone."
"Ill deeds are doubled with an evil word."
"Virtue is beauty, but the beauteous evil. Are empty trunks o'erflourished by the devil."
"I shall endeavor to marshal British opinion against a course of action which would bring in my opinion the greatest evils upon the people of India, upon the people of Great Britain and upon the British Empire itself."
"The lights of Saxon England were going out, and in the gathering darkness a gentle, grey-beard prophet foretold the end. When on his death-bed Edward spoke of a time of evil that was coming upon the land his inspired mutterings struck terror into the hearers."
"At last a vision has been vouchsafed to us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good.... With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life, without weakening or sentimentalizing it."
"Adolf Hitler was a vile, heinous, vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet."
"Evil must be confronted in its womb, and, if it can't be done otherwise, then it has to be dealt with by the use of force."
"For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds are blended so good and evil in the end become confounded."
"There is no possible source of evil except good."
"Ex Malo Bounum (good out of evil)."
"I nodded, chewing my own syrup-soaked bite. "But surely that's not all there is to it. I mean, really? A big picnic? That's Avari's master plan? That makes him sound about as dangerous as Yogi Bear." Tod shrugged. "Yeah. If Yogi were a soul-sucking, body-stealing, boyfriend-snatching, damned-soul-torturing evil demon from another world. Besides, what else could he be planning?"
