c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
No matter how hard Evil tries, it can never quite match up to the power of Good, because Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process corrupts itself. That's just the way Evil is. All things considered, it's better to be on the side of Good, even if Evil occasionally has nicer uniforms.
— John Connolly, The Infernals
Duke was already sitting in the passenger seat, waiting for her. She got in and started the car. Duke busted into a Slim Jim of his own. “You hairy toad fucker. That stuff’s nasty. Your toilet must be like a nuclear reactor.” Dove turned on her windshield wipers as a light mist seemed to fracture the glass. “I’m sorry, Whore Basket. I couldn’t hear you over the noise of you crapping your pants!” Duke took another huge bite and chewed the waxy meat like gum. “This stuff is off the charts. I could eat vats of it.
— Debra Anastasia, Fire in the Hole
Here’s the deal. We go in, you stand there like the asshole you are, and I explain you aren’t gay lovers with the pharmacist. Sound good?” Dove clicked her blinker on and checked her side mirror. “All I heard was blah, blah, holding your dick later, blah, blah.” Duke rolled down his window and stuck his face into the night.
— Debra Anastasia, Fire in the Hole
It may be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible. Some evils, indeed, are ministerial to higher forms of good; but it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever…
— William James
That’s sweet. Nice of you.” Johnson put his hands in his pockets. Dove couldn’t help but wonder if he was massaging a sore bag of testicles. Dove looked around, and Johnson shuffled his feet. It seemed neither knew what to say, but she hoped neither wanted to part ways either. Johnson’s default was always medical. “How’s your infection?” Die. Die. Kill me. “It’s… cleared up… nicely.” Dove twisted her hand into her hair.
— Debra Anastasia, Fire in the Hole
Evil is a disease able to spread from one person to another, as each convinces the other that might makes right, moral short-cuts are good things, and your enemies are not human but other
— Randall Farmer, 99 Gods: Betrayer
It wasn't right. Evil should look evil. It should reek like rotten flesh, not smell like pine cleaner and fabric softener
— Sydney Croft, Riding the Storm
When basic human needs are ignored, rejected, or invalidated by those in roles and positions to appropriately meet them; when the means by which these needs have been previously met are no longer available: and when prior abuse has already left one vulnerable for being exploited further, the stage is set for the possibility these needs will be prostituted. This situation places a survivor who has unmet needs in an incredible dilemma. She can either do without or seek the satisfaction of mobilized needs through some "illegitimate" source that leaves her increasingly divided from herself and ostracized from others.While meeting needs in this way resolves the immediate existential experience of deprivation and abandonment. it produces numerous other difﬁculties. These include experiencing oneself as “bad” or "weak" for having such strong needs; experiencing shame and guilt for relying on “illegitimate” sources of satisfaction: experiencing a loss of self-respect for indulging in activities contrary to personal moral standards of conduct; risking the displeasure and misunderstanding of others important to her; and opening oneself to the continued abuse and victimization of perpetrators who are all too willing to selﬁshly use others for their own pleasure and purposes under the guise of being 'helpful.
— J. Jeffrey Means
Never stand in the way of letting God use people’s actions, in order to solve a greater issue in the world.
— Shannon L. Alder
You must be a light unto yourself.
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
Everytime I hold you is the last time I hold you, I've known that since the very first time.
— Joakim Zander, The Swimmer
Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes — affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism — the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.
— Victor Davis Hanson
Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings?
— George Orwell, Animal Farm
Knowledge is power, power corrupts. Study hard, be evil.
— Anonymous
There are abusive individuals whose worst little demons are greed, sloth,envy, gluttony, pride and wrath enslaved by their god which is money. They usually set their false assumptions, wrong judgments, gossips and lies forceful than the ones who hold the truth but what they missed out is that the victims of their aggressions, the targets of their wrong accusations and the recipients of their repetitive harassments carry what is truly essential and what lives longer, that is: truth and goodness, both of which shall always prevail against their vicious, evil manners.
— Angelica Hopes, Landscapes of a Heart, Whispers of a Soul
Do I look evil? I can't do evil. I can barely pull off dangerous.
— Dan Abnett, Doctor Who: The Silent Stars Go By
People never like pollution, it has become very wrong to like pollution at all. But just like there are good and bad things about people, there are good and bad things about pollution. If people were pollution we would get rid of anyone who was different, anyone who was considered an inconvenience… but we’d be getting rid of a life, a lot of lives… because we didn’t like them. If pollution was a person would we still be trying to get rid of it? Would we have environmentalists still complaining and protesting and trying to get rid of all pollution?
— Rebecca McNutt, Smog City
Meddling is the evil, not indifference.
— Marty Rubin
Medicine directly to the disease doesn't work, rather, the root cause needs to be diagnosed! Similarly the evil deeds of Man can never be fixed unless the evil heart behind it, is fixed at the first place!
— Ajay Chandan
To paraphrase Hannah Arendt—as portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name—the Nazi war criminal’s actions stemmed from her well-known phrase “banality of evil,” not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss’s case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler. To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, “normal,” sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. And we ourselves must be extra vigilant, particularly in this day of accelerated technological power, heightened state surveillance, and global corporate reach, that we do not delegate our thinking to others.
— Thomas Harding
God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny; but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life....upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a man.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers
And maps can really point to placesWhere life is evil now:Nanking. Dachau.
— W.H. Auden
He had read about evil in Efanor's little book, and how it permeated the doings of Men, but he had never foud such doings evil, rather good and bad...but none without self-interest, none he could not understand even in terms of his own will to have his way.
— C.J. Cherryh, Fortress of Dragons
The greatest lie of the greatest evil is that it doesn't exist.
— G. Norman Lippert, James Potter and the Morrigan Web
The fact that we see something as evil may not necessarily make that thing evil. Evil cannot contest good
—  succeed and persist
Satan walks nowhere on this Earth, nor has he ever, save where he treads within the human heart.
— Joseph D'Lacey, Black Feathers
These minor, natural flaws did not explain why hers was but the deceptive beauty of the poisoned apple. It was not merely that she was shallow, a creature of simple malice: within her tiny skull a storm raged, hectic, vicious and vengeful. The depths of her character were murky and she herself, had she made the attempt, would struggle to rationalise her behaviour. In morals she was well-versed, for they had been imparted to her through fables as a young child, yet she could find no trace of villainy in her own actions. In her skewed world-view she was set apart.
— R.D. Shanks, A Reverie of Brothers
Everytime you do a Good Deed with true intention, your soul grows purer.
— Soman Chainani, The School for Good and Evil
...And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas
When we teach people that suspending moral judgments is a virtue, the necessary outcome is moral horror.
— Peter Boghossian
Evil originates not in the absence of guilt
—  but in our effort to escape it.
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 Baudelaire
Government should never be able to do anything you can't do. If you can't steal from your neighbor, you can't send the government to steal for you.
— Ron Paul
Is it justice to make evil, and then punish for it?
— James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
We... we are basically good.""Haven't you been paying attention, Littlepip? Deep inside, we're all raiders.""No! That's not true.""No? Even the best of us fall to evil at the drop of a hat.
— kkat, Fallout: Equestria
Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.
— Ayn Rand
Proverbs 21:15 NIV:When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.
— Anonymous
Evil is termed as sin because it has the power to attract the mind. It acts upon our mind and heart to do what nature desires, even when such acts are prohibited by the laws of society. We feel guilty doing things that nature has designed as perfectly natural.
— Awdhesh Singh, The Secret Red Book of Leadership
If he had the cleft tongue of a devil, or the snake hair of a Medusa, or the matted hair of a wolf-monster, Akhmed might understand. But Ramazan had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, pairs of arms and legs and ears, hair greasy, but not slimy and certainly not slithering, and Akhmed did not understand.
— Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Is there any one of us who doesn’t want to strike back at all the evil in this world?
— Anne Rice, The Wolf Gift
When evil enters the world, do you think it comes with horns and cloven feet, billowing some foul stench?
— Zia Haider Rahman
…all the evils of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings.
— George Orwell
Wait and wonder when we will return, mouse - then you will really see what a battle is like."Simeon turned his head in the direction of Graypatch's voice. "Alas, I will never see anything for I am blind; but I can sense a lot. I can feel you are both evil and desperate. They say you have only one eye. I am surprised at you—even a fool with half an eye could see that you will never triumph against good if you are evil.
— Brian Jacques, Mariel of Redwall
A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.
— J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Just as good and virtue, sin and evil can only be given in vigil. Who sleeps, sleeps; for the asleep there is no sin, just as there is no good, nor virtue. There is only sleep.
— Judas Iscariot The Flight of the Feathered Serpent
The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people
—  it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.
It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience; how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
As time moves on the line will blur. It will no longer seem to be the simplicity of good versus evil, but good versus fools who think they are good.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
A douchebag has an image to maintain. He is not real. He is the kind of guy who will change his last name into something cooler and more impressive.
— Cory Duchesne
And the victim must have been broken and must remain so, so that the externalization of evil is possible. The victim who refuses to assume this role contradicts society's simplistic view. Nobody wants to see it. People would have to take a look at themselves.
— Natascha Kampusch
Those are the bad guys, right?”“Depends on who wins, I guess.
— Shannon A. Thompson, Minutes Before Sunset
When you remove the concept of reward and punishment on merit, the result is the utter destruction of social fabric.
— Imran Khan
Rape is not an extraordinary or evil act for an assailant. It is like forcing someone to eat when she is not hungry.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
Because evil, my dear child, can be done to anyone and by everyone, but good can only be done to those who need it.
— Luigi Pirandello, Pirandello's One Act Plays
They thought man was a creature of rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free- free, in essence, to contend, to engage in an umpired strife, to use property to get property.
— Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the unfortunate thing about life is that everything’s mixed. There’s no absolute good and there’s no absolute evil. There’s just a lot of confusion.
— Paul Russell, The Coming Storm
[W]hen men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just. This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice;—it is a mean or compromise,between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil…
— Plato, The Republic
He that doth not as other men do, but endeavoureth that which ought to be done, shall thereby rather incur peril than preservation; for whoso laboureth to be sincerely perfect and good shall necessarily perish, living among men that are generally evil.
— Walter Raleigh
Evan no longer tells people I fight bad guys for a living. When asked, he tells his friends that his dad talks on the phone a lot and vacuums on occasion.
— David Bellavia, House to House: An Epic Memoir of War
Among the world's evils—fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation— smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kid's school.
— Jess Walter, The Financial Lives of the Poets
In most respects a pretty standard student domicile, there was something very unnerving about the apartment, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Eventually I realized: the light in the bathroom never turns off.
— Al Burian, Burn Collector: Collected Stories from One Through Nine
At the Nuremberg trials, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt described the actions and the architects of the Holocaust with a simple, memorable phase--saying that the whole lot represented 'the banality of evil.' Her long ago words applied well to the man before us.
— Michael Morton, Getting Life: An Innocent Man’s 25-Year Journey from Prison to Peace
Anxiety can make anybody act nasty, big or small. You will be tested for your strength, and if you are seen as too weak, you will sometimes be treated abusively, discarded and avoided. I'm not saying that this should happen. I'm simply describing human beings as they are.
— Cory Duchesne
If the choice is between two evils, it is still evil,
— Fred Heilbrunn
It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
— James Madison, The Federalist Papers
Some selfish people rise because some kind people haven't learned the art of saying no to them.
— Sanhita Baruah
After a victim is made to participate in an act of evil, the people in charge put a lot of energy into convincing the child or adult that he or she is evil and a perpetrator rather than a victim.p324
— Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse
On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place.
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
The ones who are insane enough to think that they can rule the world are always the ones who do.
— Stefan Molyneux
The world turns and the world changes,But one thing does not change.In all of my years, one thing does not change,However you disguise it, this thing does not change:The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
— T.S. Eliot, The Rock
The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.
— Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State
As per the Indian philosophy of the Upanishads, the source of evil is one’s ego-sense –Ahankara—which differentiates oneself from the other selves. A person, who visualizes himself independent of others, tries to guard or please himself at the cost of others. Evil is thus the tendency of a person to live a life that is not ‘in harmony’ with the rest of the world, but ‘in opposition’ to it or at best ‘in indifference’ to it. The good is to discover the unity in the diversity of ‘all selves’ and beings. Once unity in diversity is realized, every being becomes our own self and good deeds follow automatically
— Awdhesh Singh, Good and Evil: Two Sides of the Same Coin
It is said in the Upanishads: ‘I am the Universe.’ If you ask a hundred people as to how they find the world, they are all likely to give different answers. For some, the world is beautiful and the people are good, while for others, the world is extremely bad, and the people are treacherous and sinful. Why the same world is different for different people? It is so, because the outer world is the projection of our inner world. Therefore, the only way to improve the world outside is to improve the world within. While we may not have any control over the outside world, we can change our world within and thus change the world outside.
— Awdhesh Singh, Good and Evil: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Sometimes what you think is true, what you think is safe and good, is actually evil in disguise. Evil is so enticing, so deceiving, that you don't know its evil until it's wrapped you up and caressed you as a lover. You gaze into its eyes, enraptured by the pretty words whispers softly in your ears, realzing to late that the pretty words were all just twisted lies
— Quinn Loftis, Beyond the Veil
Much that may seem evil can be good.
— George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
Thalion continued. “The human world was very young and the disobedient children of God had just fallen, creating the underworld. Your God because of their desire to be like God forsook them. They craved and desired, the one thing that they should have never wanted, and that was to be as great as their creator. During this time of peace, the supernaturals traveled freely between the realms. We all knew of the fallen, the angels that had become demons, and knew that they were never to be released from the hell in which they had been cast. Their evil was beyond anything that was ever known. The leader of them, Lucifer, had declared war on the human children of God and desired more than anything to take their souls, to drag them to the hell he and his were stuck in for all eternity. All of the supernatural races were warned by an angel of God to never allow the demons from the underworld to escape their own realm. The veil was sealed by the angel and hidden from all.Unfortunately, evil always seems to find more evil. All evil things are drawn to each other, seeking out those who would help them in their cause. Though the veil to the underworld was hidden, the evil beyond it was great and as more and more lost souls were cast there after their deaths, and so the evil grew. It began to permeate the air around the veil such that other beings could detect it. There was no one who knew how to open it, but that didn’t stop them from trying.As the sons of men began to allow evil into their hearts, and as they began to stray farther from their God, they began seeking out other ways to fill the void inside them. They began to worship other beings, or objects. They sought out meanings for their lives in ways that caused darkness to creep into their hearts. God desired men to have free will and he would not force their loyalty to him. Sin was corrupting the world and Lucifer was allowed some control in the human realm. That sin gave Lucifer just the opening he needed to whisper lies into the ears of those who would listen. He pointed them in the direction divinity and sorcery where they learned how to contact the dead. They thought they were contacting loved ones who had passed on, but in reality they were drawing the demon spirits to them and giving them power, so much power that the demons began to be able to manipulate the actions of men and women still living.
— Quinn Loftis, Fate and Fury
My entire life, I saw myself as the beautiful damsel or the graceful maiden. I was the princess searching for her knight. But with my newfound abilities, I finally discovered that, after all this time, I was the powerful witch.
— Christina L. Barr
Ritually abusive groups also convince children that something evil has been put inside them. For example, a child is made to believe he or she has a "black heart" - seeing the abuser holding an animal heart and then feeling severe chest pain while it is supposedly inserted. In "brain transplants", the brain of an abuser or of a despised animal such as a rate is supposedly put into a child. Children are told that they are demons or monsters or aliens, or internal copies of an abuser whose "seed" has been implanted by rape.Ch29, p324
— Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse
Fear is the devil's most powerful tool because he can't always convince a good man to do wrong, but he can paralyze his will with fright, keeping a good man from doing what is right. It eventually results in the same end.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes
Evil isn't born...Neither is purity. Because even as newborns, there is something wrong inside of all of us bound to spring up and activate itself within us.
— A Girl From Mars
The purpose of evil is to complement the good. If there is no hatred in this world, there can’t be any love too. While love is a positive emotion, hatred is a negative emotion. Yet the feeling of love can’t exist in a person without invoking hatred. The more you are capable of loving, the more you are capable of hating, since the source of love and hatred is the same – passion. A man without passion can experience neither love nor hatred.
— Awdhesh Singh, Good and Evil: Two Sides of the Same Coin
Everything in this world seems to be created in pairs. If there is a man, there is a woman—in almost equal numbers. In the same way, there is pleasure with pain, love with hatred, wisdom with ignorance, passion with repulsion, ecstasy with depression, and so on. The world seems to have been divided into two attributes—good and evil. Even God seems to be divided--God Himself and His counterpart—the Devil.
— Awdhesh Singh, Good and Evil: Two Sides of the Same Coin
The Captain, so close as he was, didn’t warrant their attention. Even a fly on a horse’s hindquarters gets a tail whip. And that is the thick of it. We are less than flies to these foul foes.
— Greever Williams, Dust on the Mound
Scriptures exhorted men to shun evil and become good—which seems to be an impossible task—since as soon as we try to add goodness in us, evil too gets added in us without our effort—almost automatically.
— Awdhesh Singh, Good and Evil: Two Sides of the Same Coin
The key to a good life is to balance the good and evil rather than trying to get rid of all evils because if you get rid of all your evils, you would also lose all your desire and ability to do good. In other words, you become neutral like neutron and become useless for the self and the society.
— Awdhesh Singh, Good and Evil: Two Sides of the Same Coin
The very concept of evil challenges the wisdom of God because He would never create anything that is not desirable or not needed. Everything has been created in this world with a purpose.
— Awdhesh Singh, Good and Evil: Two Sides of the Same Coin
The best way to protect evil, to deny it existence.
— VicDo
Everyone,” Caitlin said, cradling her wine glass, “is the hero of his own story. That goes double for fanatics. Some of the greatest horrors in history were perpetrated by people who insisted, all the way to damnation’s door, that they fought on the side of the angels.
— Craig Schaefer, The Long Way Down
She talked about God giving man free will. Because of that, there is evil in the world. If God pulled everyone’s strings all the time, we’d be puppets.
— Janice Cantore, Critical Pursuit
The external evils are nothing compared to the evils that we harbor in our souls.
— Ella Leya, The Orphan Sky
Everyone knows that evil should be avoided wherever possible
—  few actually know where it is possible.
I like to hurt people too. I can make the cruelest choice. The difference is, sometimes I don't, and you always do, and that makes you evil.
— Veronica Roth, Allegiant
The law's a necessary evil--we canna be doing without it--but do ye not think it a poor substitute for conscience?
— Diana Gabaldon, Written in My Own Heart's Blood
Revelations help us accept the things we need the most, expose the secrets we so desperately try to hide and illuminate the dangers all around us. But more than anything, revelations are windows into our true selves... of the good and the evil and those wavering somewhere in between. But they have the ultimate power to destroy all that we cherish most.
— Emily Thorne
Meg looked. The dark shadow was still there. It had not lessened or dispersed with the coming of night. And where the shadow was, the stars were not visible.What could there be about a shadow that was so terrible that she knew that there had never been before or ever would be again, anything that would chill her with a fear that was beyond shuddering, beyond crying or screaming, beyond the possibility of comfort?
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.
— Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
This story has no moral. If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no remedy.
— Saki, The Unbearable Bassington
There's a stream that trickles through all of us. It's always there. It's evil and we know this, so we force it to mix with the larger river inside us. We let it be consumed by the greater flow of good. But when the good in the river runs dry and there isn't enough of it to dilute the stream, then the stream flows faster and harder, uncontrolled, and it finally floods one life, then another, then another. And it's always the innocent who are easiest to pull down. It's always the innocent who are standing there on the banks and looking in, curious and trusting and sometimes, maybe, even a little brave.
— T. Jefferson Parker, Where Serpents Lie
No rational person would intentionally commit an act of evil, for everyone knows that it would bring the wrath of the community upon him. (Socrates)
— Karen Essex, Stealing Athena
Evil is evil, and no good comes of calling it by any other name.
— Glenn Beck, The Eye of Moloch
Progress in evil was quick and easy; Apollyon was not a chap who hid himself and he gave every assistance in his power. The growth in goodness was so slow, at times so flat, so dull, and like the White Queen one had to run so fast to stay where one was, let alone progress; and there were few men who dared to say they had found God. It was easy to be a clever sinner, for the race to an earthly visible goal was short to run, so impossibly hard to be a wise saint, with the goal set at so vast a distance from this world and clouded with such uncertainty.
— Elizabeth Goudge, The Rosemary Tree
Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked [Edwin] Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ' knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows,' were engagingly marked by adulterous passion? But T.H. White had already considered that paradigm, was indeed rewriting it at the same time as Tolkien in The Once and Future King; and he had seen the core of Malory's work not in romantic vice but in the human urge to murder. In White the poisonous adder that provokes the last disastrous battle is no adder but a harmless grass-snake, and the flash of the sword which brings on the two armies is not natural self-defense but natural blood-lust, creating a continuum from cruelty to animals to world wars and holocausts. Malory has to be rewritten to encompass a new view of evil.
— Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
...evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Evil grows when good people do and say nothing.
— Dorothy Koomson, Marshmallows for Breakfast
In the vacuum created by fear and ignorance and hunger and want, it's evil, not good, that rushes to fill the void.
— Glenn Beck, The Overton Window
But remember, great Good will, more often than not, lead to great Evil.
— Amish Tripathi
PROPAGANDA (PROP-A-GANDER)An evil grin behind a smiling clown's maskKamil Ali
— Kamil Ali, The Initiates
Justice doesn’t talk. It sings!
— Christina L. Barr, Superkid
Without memories,there can be no good or evil. It will exist only indifference!
— N.M.
I think it is our nature to believe evil always has an ugly face,” he said, ignoring my question. “Beauty is supposed to be good and kind, and to discover it otherwise is like a betrayal of trust. A violation of the nature of things.
— Danielle L. Jensen, Stolen Songbird
Sophie and Agatha locked eyes one last time but neither screamed for the other.Once true loves, the two girls now pulled apart like strangers, each in the arms of a boy, Good with Good, Evil with Evil...Both of their wishes granted.
— Soman Chainani, A World Without Princes
There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure.
— Isabel Paterson
Maybe I was a fool to turn my back on him after his warnings, but the bad guys didn't warn you first. No, the truly wicked ones lured you in with kindness and then blindsided you with their mercilessness.
— Heather Topham Wood, Falling for Autumn
I once had a published written debate with a religious apologist who, after I had argued the standard line that the idea of a loving and merciful deity is inconsistent with the fact of natural evil, said this meant his god was not all-powerful, and therefore was not to blame because it could not stop natural evil from occuring. This is a different tack from the more robust one that says natural evil is a response to humanity's moral evil. What this latter view in effect argues is that because of (say) Hitler's wrongdoings, thousands of babies deserve to be drowned in tsunamis.
— A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism
And so sovereign Providence has often produced a remarkable effect--evil men making other evil men good. For some, when they think they suffer injustice at the hands of the worst of men, burn with hatred for evil men, and being eager to be different from those they hate, have reformed and become virtuous. It is only the power of God to which evils may also be good, when by their proper use He elicits some good result.
— Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
You know…it always seems obvious to outsiders when someone is doing something wrong, but when your mind is in the midst of evil, it is easy to be manipulated by crueller instincts.
— Cassandra Kemper, The Madder Woman
Silence in the face of evil is evil itself: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.
— Anonymous
I don't think we are cut out to be evil sorcerers, brothers," said Fentongoose. "If we were truly evil, we would not feel such sorrow at the deaths of our friends. We would just go, 'Ha! Ha! Ha!' or something.
— Philip Reeve, Goblins
Something's still wrong--the same thing that was wrong forty years ago. A malignancy, a tumor, slowly growing in someone's heart. A conscience that's seared.
— Heather Day Gilbert, Miranda Warning
I’m in love with my corporate girlfriend,with the Cyclops heart
— Phil Volatile, White Wedding Lies, and Discontent: An American Love Story
If a culture is good or evil, it is only because of its carriers.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
If we further consider this divine panoramic view within which all evil is supposedly a "secret good" is held by a God who, according to Scripture, has a passionate hatred toward all evil, the "solution" becomes more problematic still. For it is certainly not clear how God could hate what he himself wills and sees as a contributing ingredient in the good of the whole. If all things play themselves out according to a divine plan, how can God genuinely hate anything?
— Gregory A. Boyd, God at War: The Bible Spiritual Conflict
Evil comes in various forms, the one it comes most is the crowd of people.
— James Miller
There is evil hidden in everyone, mine came out left me bleeding and hurts people around me.
— Sammy Toora
Pure has become impure,Impure has now become pure.Good has now become bad,Bad has become evil.For one to live is to die,for one to die is to live.-Kikyo
— Rumiko Takahashi
And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil.
— Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup
Malevolence takes a bite out off your spirit. Just sitting with it, just talking with people who consciously and deliberately exploit others, feels like being beaten. Over the years, l have seen many therapists burn out and leave the field entirely. [Refers to treating sex offenders, p6]
— Anna C. Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, And Other Sex Offenders
Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion﻿
— Steven Weinberg
Maybe our greatest enemy isn’t the evil around us, but the evil inside us.
— Ricky Maye
If there is anything worse than evil, it is nothingness. At least evil has a form, and a voice, and a purpose, however depraved. Perhaps some good can even come out of evil: a terrible deed of violence against someone weaker may lead others to act in order to ensure that such a deed is not perpetrated again, whereas before they might have been unaware of the reasons why an individual might behave in such a way, or they might simply have chosen to ignore them. And evil, as we saw with the Blacksmith, always contains within itself the possibility of its own redemption. It is not evil that is the enemy of hope: it is nothingness.
— John Connolly, The Infernals
Evil should not be, Detective Vera. Truly never can be. But in defining it as such, an inherent human bond with negativity confirms its very existence. Its mere acknowledgement cancels its credibility. Evil is nothing—the lack of anything of substance— made concrete as a balance to everything else. Evil is not, yet it is a part ofeach human, because humans welcome its participation in their lives. They speak of it in anger or disgust, fear or even wonder— the most appropriate response— giving it a stronger foundation with every passing thought it distorts. Though within their pliable minds, they welcome it with the glee of the ignorant, nurturing the unthinkable, thinking the unimaginable, imagining the most horrid, abysmal designs, embellishing them with an insidious veracity until evil is as substantial a reality as their next breath. I strive for something else, beyond evil’s claustrophobic clutches. I strive to transcend evil by becoming pure nothing. I strive as my followers strived.” He paused, his ideology a cancer, spreading… “I am, yet I strive to not be. Do you understand, comrade?” His tone suggested fellowship, disciples of the same obscene religion. ...
— John Claude Smith, Autumn in the Abyss
Evil, unlike good, is constantly at war with those most like itself, and ambition is its spur.
— John Connolly, The Infernals
After all this time, he had hope, and then hope was gone, and he hates himself for giving in to hope. He, who exists only to kill the hopes of others, could not destroy the hope within himself.
— John Connolly, The Infernals
One thing I love about life and God: the creator of life.Within a blink of an eye; things can change either good or bad. It depends on how you want it.Good in the sense that luck will come to you; if you wish, want, need or even require the good changes.But, bad same as good changes; but, if you are evil. The evil you did will bite you in the ass. Remember these quotes:- You sow what you reap- Karma is a bitch (if you are evil) or Karma is a blessing (if you are good)- What goes around will eventually come around- What goes up will come downSo be careful what you do to others.That's why I am always cautious on the way I treat people. Yes; I am not perfect. But, I always try to be the best I can as a good and loving person despite my roots that is horrifying.
— Temitope Owosela
It is astounding to find that the belly of every black and evil thing is white as snow. And it is saddening to discover how the concealed parts of angels are leprous.
— John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart.
— John Connolly, The Infernals
Most people only have stray thoughts and it stays at that. But you’ve got power, darlin'. You flung out walking evil. Let's hope you can bring up a remedy too.
— Erik Bundy, Magic and Murder Among the Dwarves
Men who have nothing to lose never give a thought for eternal life.
— Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym
Don't let the evil actions of broken people define your view of our world! Don’t be terrorized into a diluted, hopeless reality.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
Evil is never abstract. It is always concrete, always particular and always vested in individuals. To deny monsters as individuals the right to speak, to actually state their case, is perverse - because I want to hear the Devil speak. I like the idea that a point of view can be made by the dark side.
— Clive Barker
He made a pit and digged it. He was cunning in his plans and industrious in his labors. He stooped to the dirty work of digging. He did not fear to soil his own hands. He was willing to work in a ditch if others might fall therein. What mean things men will do to wreak revenge on the godly. They hunt for good men as if they were brute beasts - they that will not give them the fair chase afforded to the hare or the fox, but must secretly entrap them because they can neither run them down nor shoot them down. Our enemies will not meet us to the face for they fear us as much as they pretend to despise us. But let us look on to the end of the scene. The verse says he has fallen into the ditch that he has made. Ah, there he is. Let us laugh at his disappointment. Lo, he is himself the beast. He has hunted his own soul. The chase has brought him a goodly victim. So should it ever be.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Human needs rules and penalties.Lessons require heroes and villains.Ignore them, then welcome to the jungle.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
Wake up ! This ain't war between good and evil anymore.This is war between good people for their respective survival.Whoever lose in this war, will be remembered as the evil one.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
I think, actually I know that it's overwhelmingly possible for men to conduct such atrocities as to kill a man in cold blood, to burn towns and to parade with the the dead on the tips of their swords. People who think they are doing something for the good of all are the most dangerous and stirs their intent deeper. There might have been a time when I thought differently and I would have answered with a quick no but that time had long passed. Do I think it's in human nature to be violent and to succumb to it? Sure I do. It's to justify it, that I think is inhuman.
— Celia McMahon, Skye
There is an old saying that goes 'Start by plucking a hair, end by killing a man'. It is also said, 'Two hands must meet to make a sound'. The atrocities that happened here weren't carried out by strangers - it was us, the people who'd once lived together harmoniously in the same village.""They say it was the superstitious freaks who did it.""No, it was Satan who did it.""Come now, what sort of a ghost is that?"Ryu Yosop replied, "It is the black thing that lives in the heart of every man.
— Hwang Sok-yong, The Guest
There was a time, when we were illiterate, insane and inhuman, and we needed religion to control the masses for the good or evil, but now we are in the time of the technological advancement, we are educated and we must let go off religion.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.
— Clarence Darrow
When the devil wants to punish his worshippers, he uses the trick of karma.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Without haters, you can't see the level of your progress, that shows you that haters are necessary evil.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
Man cannot spend all his time doing evil, and even in the company of pirates there must be some sweet moments on their sinister ship when you feel as if you were aboard a pleasure yacht.
— Honoré de Balzac, The Human Comedy: Selected Stories
But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man.
— Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Aberrations of the human mind are to a large extent due to the obsessional pursuit of some part-truth, treated as if it were a whole truth.
— Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine
I've an insatiable craving inside me that consumes everything and makes me regard the sufferings and joys of others only in their relationship to me, as food to sustain my spiritual powers. I am no longer capable of loosing my head in love, Ambition has been crushed in me by circumstances, but it has come out in another way, for ambition is nothing but a lust for power and my chief delight is to dominate those around me. To inspire in others love, devotion, fear - isn't that the first symptom and the supreme triumph of power? To cause another person suffering or joy, having no right to do so - isn't that the sweetest food of pride?
— Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time