EVIL QUOTES X

quotations about evil


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/e/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 27

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
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/e/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 37

The Dean's December


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/e/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 63

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


Most people confuse evil with their own trivial lusts and perversions. Now, true evil is as pure as innocence.

DAMIEN THORNE

The Final Conflict


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


Destroy the man of wicked thoughts,
Like a bamboo-tree with its fruit.

GAUTAMA BUDDHA

Iti-Vuttaka


Being against evil doesn't make you good.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Islands in the Stream


God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.

JOHN GREEN

Looking for Alaska


No evil can happen to a good man, neither in life nor after death.

PLATO

The Apology


It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.

J. R. R. TOLKIEN

The Return of the King


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


Evil is a hydra with many heads, and the more of them you cut off, the more it grows! Hydras have to be starved to death, do you understand that? Kill a hundred Dark Ones, and a thousand more will take their place.

SERGEI LUKYANENKO

Night Watch


Shall the hag Evil die with the child of Good,
Or propagate again her loathèd kind,
Thronging the cells of the diseased mind,
Hateful with hanging cheeks, a withered brood,
Though hourly pastured on the salient blood?

ALFRED TENNYSON

Sonnet


The wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

The Crossing


It takes longer to cure evil than to seek it.

EDWARD COUNSEL

Maxims


The evil you do to others you may expect in return.

PUBLILIUS SYRUS

The Moral Sayings of Publilius Syrus


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


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


The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism but a mask of good. The worth of the latter was transferred to the evil that drew to itself all the hatred and resentment of an order which drummed good into its adherents so that it could with impunity be evil.

THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO

Minima Moralia


A society composed of none but the wicked could not exist; it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, and without a flood, would be swept away from the earth by the deluge of its own iniquity.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon


For years I've been interested in a fundamental question concerning what I call the psychology of evil: Why is it that good people do evil deeds? I've been interested in that question since I was a little kid. Growing up in the ghetto in the South Bronx, I had lots of friends who I thought were good kids, but for one reason or another they ended up in serious trouble. They went to jail, they took drugs, or they did terrible things to other people. My whole upbringing was focused on trying to understand what could have made them go wrong.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

"You Can't be a Sweet Cucumber in a Vinegar Barrel: A Talk with Philip Zimbardo", Jan. 19, 2005