quotations about evil
Evil's a word that gets tossed around a lot. Like "great". Or "awesome".
LOLA
"B.C.", Moonlight
Evil wishes, like chickens, come home to roost.
AESOP
"The Bee and Jupiter", Aesop's Fables
The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little more off you, until there was nothing left.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Ham on Rye
Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
You would not easily guess
All the modes of distress
Which torture the tenants of earth;
And the various evils,
Which like so many devils,
Attend the poor souls from their birth.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
"Verses on a Cat"
As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.
C.S. LEWIS
Perelandra
When a man hath established a Throne of Judgment in his own soul and is able to put a difference between Good and Evil, Right and Wrong: then he must reform himself according to such knowledge and always hold himself to that which his Judgment tells him is Good and Right.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
In some situations there is no absolute good or evil, simply points of view.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
Most people confuse evil with their own trivial lusts and perversions. Now, true evil is as pure as innocence.
DAMIEN THORNE
The Final Conflict
For every great evil, apparently irremediable, there is reserved, it is probable, somewhere in the design of Providence, an effectual remedy.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
When there exists anywhere a state of suffering, a wrong, a condition of affairs that men of feeling deplore and that troubles the conscience of the upright, to become resigned to it is wicked. Although the evil flaunts itself before our eyes, and no remedy is in sight, we must go and seek a remedy. In the creation of the God of Justice, evil can be but a transitory state.
CHARLES WAGNER
Justice
Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The Revolt of the Angels
Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
What we call evil, it seems to me, is simply ignorance bumping its head in the dark.
HENRY FORD
Theosophist Magazine, Feb. 1930
Of what use are good words to an evil heart?
LOUIS BECKE
"Solepa", By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore and Other Stories
Destroy the man of wicked thoughts,
Like a bamboo-tree with its fruit.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
Many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
Human beings mostly aren't [evil]. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.
NEIL GAIMAN & TERRY PRATCHETT
Good Omens
A man that does nothing but watch evil, never will overcome it.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever -- money, for instance, or war.
SAUL BELLOW
The Dean's December