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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"And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life."
"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."
"Badness is only spoiled goodness."
"They’d say, ‘If you play the record backwards, you can hear evil things like 'grrrr!'’ and I would think, ‘Geez, I didn’t know the devil sounded like that. I thought he was coherent like the rest of us.’"
"Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no."
"The only defense against evil, violent people is good people who are more skilled at violence."
"Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable."
"There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil."
"Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before."
"I turned against the left wing because they don't like genetics, because genetics implies that sometimes in life we fail because we have bad genes. They want all failure in life to be due to the evil system."
"If you permit your thoughts to dwell on evil you yourself will become ugly. Look only for the good in everything so you absorb the quality of beauty."
"The omission of good is no less reprehensible than the commission of evil."
"I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil."
"I consider even a victorious war as an evil, from which statesmanship must endeavor to spare nations."
"There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it."
"Laws are like medicine; they generally cure an evil by a lesser or a passing evil."
"We should live totally in the face of the night and of the Evil."
"Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete."
"Those who voluntarily put power into the hands of a tyrant ... must not wonder if it be at last turned against themselves."
"Since God is the highest good, he would not allow any evil to exist in his works unless his omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil."
