quotations about evil
As we have come to understand the psychology of evil, we have realized that such transformations of human character are not as rare as we would like to believe. Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the "banality of evil" -- that is, under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people can commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
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"The Banality of Heroism", Greater Good, Sep. 1, 2006
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
Evil is relative.... You can’t hang a sign on it. You can’t touch it or taste it or cut it with a sword. Evil depends on where you are standing, pointing your indicting finger.
GLEN COOK
The Black Company
Universal bond, we're all the same
Evil man, not to be tamed
Open your mind, and you will find
You're just as evil, as evil as I
LAKE OF TEARS
"Evil Inside", Greater Art
One may smile, and smile, and be a villain!
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
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
Even an evil man can have principles--he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.
NORMAN MAILER
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1964
I believed in love, but I believed in evil too. Neither love nor evil conquers all, but evil cheats more.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Cerulean Sins
Evil eyes look out for occasion, therefore give none.
SABINE BARING-GOULD
Urith
The hardest fact in the world to accept is the inevitable mixture of evil with good in all things.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The Lord is known by his justice; the wicked are ensnared by the work of their hands.
BIBLE
Psalms 9:16
It is the business of a man, either to prevent an evil that threatens him, or, when it is come, to qualify and alleviate its malignity; or put on a masculine brave spirit, and to resolve to endure it.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.
ANATOLE FRANCE
The Revolt of the Angels
We return evil for evil, in which there is no sin, for it is necessary to pay a wicked man in his own coin.
CHANAKYA
Vridda-Chanakya
Those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters, for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves we collude with it through our apathy.
J. K. ROWLING
speech, Jun. 5, 2008
Evils in the journey of life are like the hills which alarm travellers upon their road; they both appear great at a distance, but when we approach them we find that they are far less insurmountable than we had conceived.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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
Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.
WALT DISNEY
Deeds Rather Than Words
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 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