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Quotes about good and evil

192 quotes from 117 people

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Evil and good are God’s right hand and left.
Philip James Bailey1816–1902Festus (1839), Proem
- God
Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.
And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.
Viktor Frankl1905–1997Postscript 1984: The Case for a Tragic Optimism, based on a lecture at the Third World Congress of Logotherapy, Regensburg University (19 June 1983)
- War & Peace
We don’t want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can’t improve something that is intrinsically evil.
Desmond Tutu1931–2021Speech (1985) as quoted in Equality, Volume 1, Issue 1 (1989)
- Race
The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even — if you will — eccentricity.
Joseph Brodsky1940–1996“A Commencement Address” (1984), delivered at Williams College; As quoted in: Robert Inchausti (2014) Thinking through Thomas Merton. p. 110
- Thinking
Patient endurance of evil does not mean a recognition of its rights. That is sheer sentimentality, and Jesus will have nothing to do with it.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer1906–1945The Cost of Discipleship (1937), “Revenge”, p. 142
- Christianity
I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph, and that there is purpose and worth to each and every life.
Ronald Reagan1911–2004Dedication of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (1991)
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 of today has achieved much, but for all its declared love for humanity, it has based itself far more on hatred and violence than on the virtues that make one human.
Jawaharlal Nehru1889–1964The Discovery of India (1946)
- Virtue
Evil cannot perish without the destruction of much that lives by the evil, and it is no less destruction even if we personally are saved the pain of a sensational act of violence.
Sri Aurobindo1872–1950“Kurukshetra” in Essays on the Gita (1995), p. 39
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
A good End cannot sanctifie evil Means; nor must we ever do Evil, that Good may come of it.
William Penn1644–1718Some Fruits of Solitude (1693), nos. 537–539
- Morality
Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.
Hermann Hesse1877–1962Siddhartha (1922)
The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
Arthur Miller1915–2005Paris Review (Summer 1966)
All evil in the world is the result of an imbalance between the people who benefit from shenanigans and the people who get screwed by shenanigans.
Cory Doctorowborn 1971Petard: A Tale of Just Deserts (2014), p. 317
Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
Primo Levi1919–1987Appendix (1976) to If This Is a Man, as translated in The New Republic