quotations about evil
When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.
BIBLE
Proverbs 21:15
There is good in all. Yes! we all believe it: not a man in the depth of his vanity but will yield assent. But do you not all, in practice, daily, hourly deny it? A beggar passes you in the street: dirty, ragged, importunate. "Ah! he has a bad look," and your pocket is safe. He starves--and he steals. "I thought he was bad." You educated him in the State Prison. He does not improve even in this excellent school. "He is," says the gaoler, "thoroughly bad." He continues his course of crime. All that is bad in him having by this time been made apparent to himself, his friends, and the world, he has only to confirm the decision, and at length we hear when he has reached his last step. "Ah! no wonder--there was never any good in him. Hang him!"
T. S. ARTHUR
"Good In All", Friends and Neighbors
Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole.
CARL JUNG
Memories
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
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 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
One thing I've learned from centuries of combat is that no matter how thoroughly you think you exterminate the evil, it comes creeping back like a cockroach.
DR. FATE
"The Hand of Fate", Superman
In some situations there is no absolute good or evil, simply points of view.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
Devil inside
The devil inside
Every single one of us
The devil inside
INXS
"Devil Inside"
No man is permanently and fixedly evil, until he is willingly evil.
REUEN THOMAS
Thoughts for the Thoughtful
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
I've got evil in me as much as anyone, some desires that scare me. Even if I don't give in to them, just having them scares the living bejesus out of me sometimes. I'm no saint, the way you kid about. But I've always walked the line, walked that goddamned line. It's a mean mother of a line, straight and narrow, sharp as a razor, cuts right into you when you walk it long enough. You're always bleeding on that line, and sometimes you wonder why you don't just step off and walk in the cool grass.
DEAN KOONTZ
Dark Rivers of the Heart
Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Thoughts on Art and Life
Most people confuse evil with their own trivial lusts and perversions. Now, true evil is as pure as innocence.
DAMIEN THORNE
The Final Conflict
The ultimate test ... to see the good in evil and the evil in good.
FRANK HERBERT
Heretics of Dune
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"
Evil wishes, like chickens, come home to roost.
AESOP
"The Bee and Jupiter", Aesop's Fables
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
In some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
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