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Topics/Morality

Quotes about good and evil

192 quotes from 117 people

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People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 17 December, 1920
- Power
It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disaster. There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference.
Helen Keller1880–1968Optimism (1903)
The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. Whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
Ayn Rand1905–1982Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
- Morality
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 is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.
Kurt Vonnegut1922–2007The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 7 “Victory” (p. 165; epigram)
To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.
Charles Baudelaire1821–1867Le Spleen de Paris (1862), XXVIII: “La Fausse Monnaie”
It is not possible to enter into the nature of the Good by standing aloof from it — by merely speculating upon it.
Felix Adler1851–1933Life and Destiny (1913), p.34
- Morality
I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifestation of the error-correcting process of evolution.
Jonas Salk1914–1995Academy of Achievement interview (1991)
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
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
Isaiah766–686 BCIsaiah 5:20 (KJV)
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
One single war — we all know — may be productive of more evil, immediate and subsequent, than hundreds of years of the unchecked action of the mutual-aid principle may be productive of good.
Peter Kropotkin1842–1921Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)
- War & Peace
For evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name “evil.”
Augustine of Hippo354–430The City of God, Book XI, ch. 9
The right way to requite evil, according to Jesus, is not to resist it. This saying of Christ removes the Church from the sphere of politics and law.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer1906–1945The Cost of Discipleship (1937), “Revenge”, p. 141
- Christianity
- Politics
Because we have sought to cover up past evil, though it still persists, we have been powerless to check the new evil of today.
Evil unchecked grows, Evil tolerated poisons the whole system.
Jawaharlal Nehru1889–1964The Unity of India: Collected Writings, 1937-1940 (1942), p. 280