Famously Said Random quote

Topics/Morality

Quotes about good and evil

192 quotes from 117 people

Most readBy personPage 2 of 13

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
Plato429–349 BCApology, 41c–e
No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.
Theodore Roosevelt1858–1919The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1910)
When good men die their goodness does not perish, but lives though they are gone. As for the bad, all that was theirs dies and is buried with them.
Euripides481–407 BCFrg. 734 (Bartlett’s, 1892)
The greatest penalty of evildoing is to grow into the likeness of bad men.
Plato429–349 BCDialogues, Theatetus
As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.
Clarence Darrow1857–1938Arguments in the Case of the Communist Labor Party (1920), p. 52
Feel no sadness because of evil thoughts: it only strengthens them.
NBNachman of Bratslav
- Thinking
When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.
Mae West1893–1980
Life⁠—the way it really is⁠—is a battle not between bad and good but between bad and worse.
Joseph Brodsky1940–1996
The forces that tend for evil are great and terrible, but the forces of truth and love and courage and honesty and generosity and sympathy are also stronger than ever before.
Theodore Roosevelt1858–1919The Man with the Muck Rake (1906)
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard Shaw1856–1950The Devil’s Disciple, Act II (1901)
- Morality
What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Chapter IV, aphorism 153, tr. Helen ZimmernIn context
- Love
Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality,
And the vast that is evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.
Walt Whitman1819–1892Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Roaming in Thought, 1
There are moments when I feel that the Shylocks, the Judases, and even the Devil, are broken spokes in the great wheel of good which shall in due time be made whole.
Helen Keller1880–1968The Story of My Life (1903), Ch. 21
Be frustrate, all ye stratagems of Hell,
And devilish machinations come to nought.
John Milton1608–1674Paradise Regained (1671), Book I: Lines 72-73
There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness.
William Blake1757–1827Annotations to Swedenborg (1788)