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Topics/Morality

Quotes about good and evil

192 quotes from 117 people

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Vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.
Edmund Burke1729–1797Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Volume iii, p. 332
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn.
Robert Burns1759–1796Man was Made to Mourn, st. 7 (1786)
States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.
George W. Bushborn 1946The Axis of Evil (2002)
- War & Peace
Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere.
George W. Bushborn 1946Farewell Address to the Nation (15 January 2009)
We’ve come to know truths that we will never question: evil is real, and it must be opposed.
George W. Bushborn 1946The Axis of Evil (2002)
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?
Albert Camus1913–1960Said at the Dominican Monastery of Latour-Maubourg (1948); reported in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (translation by Justin O’Brien, 1961), p. 73
- Children
There are depths in man which go down the length of the lowest Hell, as there are heights which reach the highest Heaven; — for are not both Heaven and Hell made out of him, everlasting Miracle and Mystery that he is?
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881The French Revolution. A History (1837), Pt. III, Bk. I, ch. 4.
My success and my misfortunes, the bright and the dark days I have gone through, everything has proved to me that in this world, either physical or moral, good comes out of evil just as well as evil comes out of good.
Giacomo Casanova1725–1798Memoirs of J. Casanova de Seingalt (1894)
- Experience
It is evil things that we will be fighting against⁠—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution⁠—and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.
Neville Chamberlain1869–1940Broadcast from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street (3 September 1939)
- War & Peace
The world is not destroyed by villains and conflagrations, but by hate and malice and all this spiteful tattling.
Anton Chekhov1860–1904Uncle Vanya (1897), Act II, spoken by HelenaIn context
- Anger
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
G. K. Chesterton1874–1936In The Illustrated London News (23 October 1909)
Iago’s soliloquy⁠—the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity⁠—how awful it is!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge1772–1834Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets (1811–1818), Part II: “The Lectures and Notes of 1818”, Section IV: “Notes on Some Other Plays of Shakespeare”, § “Othello”, p. 388
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad1857–1924Under Western Eyes (1911), Pt. II, ch. 4
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
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Richard Dawkinsborn 1941River out of Eden (1995), pp. 131–132
- Science