quotations about evil
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
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
I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, stil, you couldn't look at him the same way again.
DAVID SEDARIS
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Evils are the breathings of the unjust.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
No evil can happen to a good man, neither in life nor after death.
PLATO
The Apology
It takes longer to cure evil than to seek it.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
It is necessary to believe that the mixture of evil has produced the greatest possible good: otherwise the evil would not have been permitted.
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ
letter to Bourguet, 1712
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
An evil thought in a soul is like a water-rat swimming in a pond at evening: the rat destroys the iridescent reflection of heaven in the water.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
For hence I believed Evil also to be some such kind of substance, and to have its own foul and hideous bulk; whether gross, which they called earth, or thin and subtile (like the body of the air), which they imagine to be some malignant mind, creeping through that earth. And because a piety, such as it was, constrained me to believe that the good God never created any evil nature, I conceived two masses, contrary to one another, both unbounded, but the evil narrower, the good more expansive.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
The ultimate test ... to see the good in evil and the evil in good.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
People aren't evil and people aren't good. They live how they can one day at a time. They come out of dust they go back to dust, dusty feet, no wings, and whose fault is that?
CARYL CHURCHILL
A Dream Play
God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.
JOHN GREEN
Looking for Alaska
For neither good nor evil can last for ever; and so it follows that as evil has lasted a long time, good must now be close at hand.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
The evil you do to others you may expect in return.
PUBLILIUS SYRUS
The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus
In every man's heart there is a devil, but we do not know the man as bad until the devil is roused.
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
"The Case of Beauvais", Back to God's Country and Other Stories
If you speak not, you cannot speak evil.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Evil is retributive: every trespass slips fetters on the will, holds the soul in durance till contrition and repentance restore it to liberty.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
All evils are equal when they are extreme.
PIERRE CORNEILLE
Horace
I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: a man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.
ROD SERLING
Los Angeles Times, 1967