Evil famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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Diminish the mass of evils that afflict the human species, increase enjoyment and well-being. And even if the new routes opened up could prolong the average life of mankind by only a few hours, or even a few days, then the scientist, too could aspire.
-- Antoine Lavoisier -
Definition of Good and Evil: Good is what you like. Evil is what you don't like.
-- Anton Szandor LaVey -
I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.
-- Antonia Fraser -
God makes all things good; Man meddles with 'em and they become evil.
-- Aphra Behn -
I might have speculated on my chances of going to Heaven; but candidly I did not care. I could not have wept if I had tried. I had no wish to review the evils of my past. But the past did seem to have been a bit wasted. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions: the road to Heaven is paved with lost opportunities.
-- Apsley Cherry-Garrard -
It will never do to plead sin as an excuse for sin, or to attempt to justify sinful acts by pleading that we have an evil heart. This instead of being a valid apology, is the very ground of our condemnation.
-- Archibald Alexander -
Insanity has excuses; wickedness has not.
-- Ariana Franklin -
Man provides his own goods and his own evils, neither God nor the Devil has anything to do with it.
-- Ariana Franklin -
Our hearts are with you and we are ready to provide any assistance at any time....This is a war between good and evil and between humanity and the bloodthirsty.
-- Ariel Sharon -
In principle, I'm sorry that we didn't liquidate him
-- Ariel Sharon -
Evil events from evil causes spring, And what you suffer flows from what you've done.
-- Aristophanes -
We must as second best, as people say, take the least of the evils.
-- Aristotle -
For the lesser evil is reckoned a good in comparison with the greater evil, since the lesser evil is rather to be chosen than the greater. .
-- Aristotle -
And it is characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes family and a state.
-- Aristotle -
The majority of mankind would seem to be beguiled into error by pleasure, which, not being really a good, yet seems to be so. So that they indiscriminately choose as good whatsoever gives them pleasure, while they avoid all pain alike as evil.
-- Aristotle -
...perhaps there is some element of good even in the simple act of living, so long as the evils of existence do not preponderate too heavily.
-- Aristotle -
In bad or corrupted natures the body will often appear to rule over the soul, because they are in an evil and unnatural condition. At all events we may firstly observe in living creatures both a despotical and a constitutional rule; for the soul rules the body with a despotical rule, whereas the intellect rules the appetites with a constitutional and royal rule. And it is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient; whereas the equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always hurtful.
-- Aristotle -
At some point we must make a decision not to allow the mere threat of charges of cultural or religious insensitivity to stop us from dealing with this evil
-- Armstrong Williams -
Slavery is the ultimate and greatest evil. For it is based on a denial of the dignity of the human soul.
-- Arthur Bryant -
He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
To that Providence, my sons, I hereby commend you, and I counsel you by way of caution to forbear from crossing the moor in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
'Men die of the diseases which they have studied most,' remarked the surgeon, snipping off the end of a cigar with all his professional neatness and finish. 'It's as if the morbid condition was an evil creature which, when it found itself closely hunted, flew at the throat of its pursuer. If you worry the microbes too much they may worry you. I've seen cases of it, and not necessarily in microbic diseases either. There was, of course, the well-known instance of Liston and the aneurism; and a dozen others that I could mention.'
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
When "Do no Evil" has been understood, Then learn the harder, braver rule, "Do Good.
-- Arthur Guiterman -
Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence 'unnatural,' but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.
-- Arthur Koestler -
The evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality.
-- Arthur Koestler -
The evil of the Church is the doing of Church work in a spirit of business, something to be got through. The only way to avoid this is for the priest to be instant in prayer. If he is not, he will lose that touch of the supernatural, without which he has no right to be a priest at all.
-- Arthur Middleton -
Christ pitied because He loved, because He saw through all the wretchedness, and darkness, and bondage of evil; that there was in every human soul a possibility of repentance, of restoration; a germ of good, which, however stifled and overlaid, yet was capable of recovery, of health, of freedom, of perfection.
-- Arthur Penrhyn Stanley -
Doubtless there are times when controversy becomes a necessary evil. But let us remember that it is an evil.
-- Arthur Penrhyn Stanley -
All pantheism must ultimately be shipwrecked on the inescapable demands of ethics, and then on the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany , then everything done by man, and even by animal, is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be more censurable and nothing more praiseworthy than anything else; hence there is no ethics.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Ist es an und fu? r sich absurd, das Nichtsein fu? r einUbel zu ? halten; da jedes Ubel wie jedes Gut das Dasein zur Voraussetzung hat, ja sogar das Bewusstsein. It is in and by itself absurd to regard non-existence as an evil; for every evil, like every good, presupposes existence, indeed even consciousness.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
How does God save His people from the pleasure of sin? The answer is, “By imparting to them a nature which hates evil and loves holiness.†This takes place when they are born again, so that actual salvation begins with regeneration. Of course it does; where else could it commence? Fallen man can neither perceive his desperate need of salvation, nor come to Christ for it, till he has been renewed by the Holy Spirit.
-- Arthur W. Pink -
It's odd how those who dismiss the peace movement as utopian, don't hesitate to proffer the most absurdly dreamy reasons for going to war: to stamp out terrorism, install democracy, eliminate fascism, and most entertainingly, to "rid the world of evil-doers.
-- Arundhati Roy -
Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature.
-- Arundhati Roy -
To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.
-- Arundhati Roy -
Never be frightened! Be fearless! There is no room for fear. Fear is death, fear is sin, fear is hell, fear is adharma and fear is disloyalty. All delusions emanate from this evil called fear.
-- Asaram -
The indifference, callousness and contempt that so many people exhibit toward animals is evil first because it results in great suffering in animals, and second because it results in an incalculably great impoverishment of the human spirit. All education should be directed toward the refinement of the individual's sensibilities in relation not only to one's fellow humans everywhere, but to all things whatsoever.
-- Ashley Montagu -
Judicial execution can never cancel or remove the atrocity it seeks to punish; it can only add a second atrocity to the original one ... So long as one sees killing as wrong there is no need to waste time with the deterrent argument, since it would be nonsense to try to prevent a theoretical evil in the future by perpetrating an actual one in the present.
-- Auberon Waugh -
Those who won't accept evil never get anything good.
-- August Strindberg -
Now I know the full power of evil. It makes ugliness seem beautiful and goodness seem ugly and weak.
-- August Strindberg -
It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss in all things good; but in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of.
-- Augustus Hare -
Never put much confidence in such as put no confidence in others. A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking in his neighbor for what he sees in himself. As to the pure all things are pure, even so to the impure all things are impure.
-- Augustus Hare -
A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking in his neighbor for what he sees in himself.
-- Augustus Hare -
When will talkers refrain from evil speaking? When listeners refrain from evil hearing. At present there are many so credulous of evil, they will receive suspicions and impressions against persons whom they don't know, from a person whom they do know--an authority good for nothing.
-- Augustus William Hare -
When will talkers refrain from evil speaking: when listeners refrain from evil-hearing.
-- Augustus William Hare -
There are days when you just don't feel all that evil." You don't become a world-class villain overnight." -Dr. Impossible
-- Austin Grossman -
The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.
-- Ayn Rand -
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.
-- Ayn Rand -
Man's basic vice, the source of all his evils, is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of his consciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.
-- Ayn Rand -
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 Rand -
There are no evil thoughts except one; the refusal to think.
-- Ayn Rand -
When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, "Who is destroying the world?" You are.
-- Ayn Rand -
Government control of the economy, no matter in whose behalf, has been the source of all the evils in our industrial society -- and the solution is laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the abolition of any and all forms of intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.
-- Ayn Rand -
The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
-- Ayn Rand -
Whatever may be open to disagreement, there is one act of evil that may not, the act that no man may commit against others and no man may sanction or forgive. So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others.
-- Ayn Rand -
Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.
-- Ayn Rand -
Since reason is man’s basic means of survival, that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil.
-- Ayn Rand -
All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.
-- Ayn Rand -
I cannot stand Tolstoy, and reading him was the most boring literary duty I ever had to perform, his philosophy and his sense of life are not merely mistaken, but evil, and yet, from a purely literary viewpoint, on his own terms, I have to evaluate him as a good writer.
-- Ayn Rand -
You'll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a moral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last act of being victim to your own virtue. We'll wait for you and when you come back, you will have discovered that there need never be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash of values as the one you've borne so well.
-- Ayn Rand -
I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.
-- Ayn Rand -
You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.
-- Azar Nafisi -
Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.
-- Azar Nafisi -
None of us can avoid being contaminated by the world's evils; it's all a matter of what attitude you take towards them.
-- Azar Nafisi -
War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.
-- B. H. Liddell Hart -
If a man has beheld evil, he may know that it was shown to him in order that he learn his own guilt and repent; for what is shown to him is also within him.
-- Baal Shem Tov -
Evil report carries further than any applause.
-- Baltasar Gracian -
The reason we're governing right now is because we defeated moderate Republicans with moderate Democrats. And people need to be patient about that and realize that compromise is not evil.
-- Barack Obama -
I face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world.
-- Barack Obama -
We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It's beyond reason.
-- Barack Obama -
Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
-- Barack Obama -
Good must triumph over evil. It usually does in life and in any case it's bad for young people to believe it doesn't.
-- Barbara Cartland -
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
-- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison -
In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.
-- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison -
The great human problem of evil stems from the illusion of separateness. Whenever this illusion is overcome, we behave lovingly to one another.
-- Barbara Marx Hubbard -
Loathesome I am, and evil. You can mock me for that. But leave my pain alone!
-- Barnabas -
The evil is not that you cannot change human nature. The evil is that human nature cannot change you.
-- Barrows Dunham -
Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.
-- Baruch Spinoza -
A good thing which prevents us from enjoying a greater good is in truth an evil.
-- Baruch Spinoza -
Christ shared our experience; he suffered as we suffer; he died as we shall die, and for forty days in the desert he underwent the struggle between good and evil.
-- Basil Hume -
That is different, to have someone think that I am evil when I really am not.
-- Bela Lugosi -
You know George M. Steinbrenner III is the center of all evil in the universe.
-- Ben Affleck -
The man that is once hated, both his good and his evil deeds oppress him.
-- Ben Jonson -
It must be obvious that liberty necessarily means freedom to choose foolishly as well as wisely; freedom to choose evil as well as good; freedom to enjoy the rewards of good judgment, and freedom to suffer the penalties of bad judgment. If this is not true, the word "freedom" has no meaning.
-- Ben Moreell -
I am back in LA now. And I keep thinking back to my time in New York after the bombings.... I was crying so much I could not see, and the other diners joined in, and I thought, What do you do with such atheistic evil?
-- Ben Stein -
The prophet shows that, for the sake of silence, we are to abstain even from good talk. If this be so, how much more needful is it that we refrain from evil words, on account of the penalty of the sin!
-- Benedict of Nursia -
There are in life real evils enough, and it is folly to afflict ourselves with imaginary ones; it is time enough when the real ones arrive.
-- Benjamin -
Evil communication corrupts good manners. I hope to live to hear that good communication corrects bad manners.
-- Benjamin Banneker -
I grew up in Detroit. I grew up in an environment where you were supposed to be Democrat, where they told you that Republicans were evil people and that they were racist.
-- Benjamin Carson -
Let no pleasure tempt thee, no profit allure thee, no persuasion move thee, to do anything which thou knowest to be evil; so shalt thou always live jollity; for a good conscience is a continual Christmas.
-- Benjamin Franklin -
There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.
-- Benjamin Haydon -
Mothers and schools plant the seeds of nearly all the good and evil which exists in the world.
-- Benjamin Rush
