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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"The substance of the universe is obedient and compliant; and the reason which governs it has in itself no cause for doing evil, for it has no malice, nor does it do evil to anything, nor is anything harmed by it. But all things are made and perfected according to this reason."
"Why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature."
"It is our own evil thoughts which madden us."
"Of evils one should choose the least. [Lat., Ex malis eligere minima oportere.]"
"How great an evil do you see that may have been announced by you against the Republic? - Videtis quantum scelus contra rem publicam vobis nuntiatum sit?"
"Ignorance of impending evil is far better than a knowledge of its approach."
"I walked out on American Gangster: this evil piece of dreck. Defenders of this junk say that these movies give Black actors jobs. So did "Birth of a Nation.""
"My humor is - was quite different. Mine was "Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother" and "The World's Greatest Lover" and "Haunted Honeymoon," "The Woman In Red," things - "See No Evil, Hear No Evil." But his was much broader, and I think much funnier, too."
"Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers-passageways- for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don't think about what constitutes good or evil. They don't care whether we are happy or unhappy. We're just means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them."
"When I start creating a villain, I start liking the villain and so the villain is not really evil."
"I hold that all the evil we know on earth finds in this violence done to love its true and legitimate birth."
"We frequently do good in order to enable us to do evil later with impunity exemption of punishment."
"Men have written in the most convincing manner to prove that death is no evil, and this opinion has been confirmed on a thousand celebrated occasions by the weakest of men as well as by heroes. Even so I doubt whether any sensible person has ever believed it, and the trouble men take to convince others as well as themselves that they do shows clearly that it is no easy undertaking."
"Pity is often a reflection of our own evils in the ills of others. It is a delicate foresight of the troubles into which we may fall."
"Happy people rarely correct their faults; they consider themselves vindicated, since fortune endorses their evil ways."
"However evil men may be they dare not be openly hostile to virtue, and so when they want to attack it they pretend to find it spurious , or impute crimes to it."
"The evil that we do does not attract to us so much persecution and hatred as our good qualities."
"A man would rather say evil of himself than say nothing."
"President Numeiri of Sudan is said to have remarked of Gadaffi that he was 'a man with a split personality - both of them evil'."
"I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil ; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough."
