c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
God never cooperates with evil. He simply offers us the opportunity to transform the painful experiences in our lives into advantages and blessings. (Fr. Maximos)
— Kyriacos C. Markides, The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality
The most evil institution in the world is the Roman Catholic Church.
— H.G. Wells, Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church
A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?
— Saul Bellow, Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories
But how conceive a God supremely good/ Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/ Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?[Written after an earthquake in Lisbon killed over 15,000 people]
— Voltaire, Poem Upon the Lisbon Disaster
As a scientist, I can not help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation. None is perfect or inspired.The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me. I don't want to have anything to do with such a God.
— Luther Burbank
... on the historical scale, the damages wrought by individual violence for selfish motives are insignificant compared to the holocausts resulting from self-transcending devotion to collectively shared belief-systems. It is derived from primitive identification instead of mature social integration; it entails the partial surrender of personal responsibility and produces the quasi-hypnotic phenomena of group-psychology.
— Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine
World is beautiful but it is dangerous place to live, there is so much evil behind a normal person.
— John Art
Socialism always produces evil results, no matter one's intentions.
— Dave Champion
He suffered from an unlucky faculty—common to many men, especially Russians—the faculty of seeing and believing in the possibility of good and truth, and at the same time seeing too clearly the evil and falsity of life to be capable of taking a serious part in it.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
The world has many places that can make us uncomfortable. Calling them evil, or any other bad name, doesn’t make them go away.
— J.Z. Colby, Journey
It doesn't matter if you do everything right, if you dress the right way and act the right way and follow all the rules, because evil will find you anyway. Evil's resourceful that way.
— Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility
Your whole life, you are told what is right and what is wrong. What you should do and what you should not do. What makes a good citizen and what makes a traitorous one. What happens, then, when you do everything you are not meant to do? Break down each and every barrier? Find out how good you are by how evil you can be?
— Laura Lam, Shadowplay
The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control. In the words of total need: "Wouldn't you?" Yes you would. You would lie, cheat, inform on your friends, steal, do anything to satisfy total need. Because you would be in a state of total sickness, total possession, and not in a position to act in any other way. Dope fiends are sick people who cannot act other than they do. A rabid dog cannot choose but bite.
— William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.Socrates taught us: 'Know thyself!
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Evil is never in a rush. It creeps up slowly. It doesn't hide, but confronts you in broad daylight. It gives decades of warnings, even centuries at times. Time is never the problem when you battle Evil. The problem is the will to fight it.
— Amish Tripathi, The Oath of the Vayuputras
There are different ways of evil and I prefer mine to yours.
— E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
Fear is the original sin,” suddenly said a still, small voice away back—back—back of Valancy’s consciousness. “Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that some one is afraid of something.”Valancy stood up. She was still in the clutches of fear, but her soul was her own again. She would not be false to that inner voice.
— L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle
In the absence of light, only darkness is left.
— Reyna Pryde, Bound by Sacrifice
I remembered those frantic seconds when I’d thought all I loved and knew, all that was Sydney Sage, would be lost from this world. My battered friends and I had just had a brush with death, dancing with this evil. We’d destroyed it, but it was terrifying how touch and go it all had been. At any moment, the Strigoi could have gained the advantage and killed one or all of us. Life and death were inextricably bound together, and we wavered between them. But we’d triumphed over death tonight. We were alive, and the world was beautiful. Life was beautiful, and I refused to waste mine.
— Richelle Mead, The Fiery Heart
I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, love is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. To return hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil, and this can only be done through love.”— 	Martin Luther King Jr.
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Evil would never bring Good, however much they wanted to believe that it would. By the time they discovered the truth, it would be too late.
— Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym
It was not evil that gave her the idea of pleasure, that seemed to her attractive; it was pleasure, rather, that seemed evil.
— Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
Is there such depravity in man as that he should injure another without benefit to himself?
— Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is wrong. Some will call it insane; that is, will accuse it of a deficiency of intelligence. This is not necessarily true at all. You could not tell whether the act was unintelligent or not unless you knew my grandmother. Some will call it vulgar, disgusting, and the rest of it; that is, they will accuse it of a lack of manners. Perhaps it does show a lack of manners; but this is scarcely its most serious disadvantage. Others will talk about the loathsome spectacle and the revolting scene; that is, they will accuse it of a deficiency of art, or æsthetic beauty. This again depends on the circumstances: in order to be quite certain that the appearance of the old lady has definitely deteriorated under the process of being beaten to death, it is necessary for the philosophical critic to be quite certain how ugly she was before. Another school of thinkers will say that the action is lacking in efficiency: that it is an uneconomic waste of a good grandmother. But that could only depend on the value, which is again an individual matter. The only real point that is worth mentioning is that the action is wicked, because your grandmother has a right not to be beaten to death. But of this simple moral explanation modern journalism has, as I say, a standing fear. It will call the action anything else—mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it sinful.
— G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered
The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good.
— Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation
The visual of Satan isn’t one of a big red devil with horns. Even worse, it’s the picture of something good, twisted enough to be compelling.
— Todd Stocker
We did not speak of what we had seen. At the time, to speak of it seemed worse than sacrilege: We had witnessed a thing so terrible that it acquired a dreadful holiness. It was a miracle of evil. It was not possible to say with words what we had witnessed, and so we kept it safely guarded until the time we could bring it out, and show it to others, and say, 'Behold. This is the worst thing man can do'.
— Irene Gut Opdyke
...So little knowsAny but God alone to value rightThe good before him but perverts best thingsTo worst abuse or to their meanest use.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
There’s real evil, Mr Honey. Not that existential crap, either.
— Laird Barron, The Best Horror of the Year Volume Four
Good necessitates evil.
— Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice
Remember, I am always 12 steps ahead..
— Silvia Flores, Blood and Dust
They had set forth to rid their town of evil and had managed to rid it of pleasure as well.
— Angel Cox, A Day in the Dark
Water is so friendly when you have it on your palms, but so evil when they have you on theirs.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
Had God kept from being made those who through His goodness were to have existence, but who by their own choice were to become evil, then evil would have prevailed over the goodness of God. Thus, all things which God makes He makes good, but each one becomes good or evil by his own choice. So, even if the Lord did say: 'It were better for him if that man had not been born,' He did not say so in deprecation of His own creature, but in deprecation of that creature's choice and rashness.
— John Damascene
Do you have to find the evil in yourself in order to truly recognize it in the world?
— Piper Kerman, Orange Is the New Black
They say curiosity killed the cat but I am unconcerned. I am smarter, though slightly less evil, than any cat.
— Eliza Crewe
There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies. We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant.
— Glen Cook, Chronicles of the Black Company
An old man spoke to his grandson. "My child," he said. "Inside everyone there is a battle between two wolves. One is Evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, inferiority, lies, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, and truth." The boy thought for a moment. Then he asked, "Which wolf wins?" A moment of silence passed before the old man replied. And then he said, "The one you feed." - Native American Folk Tale
— Christine Woodward, Rogue Touch
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he was evil.
— Edmund Carver
At the highest levels of the medical cartel, vaccines are a top priority because they cause a weakening of the immune system. I know that may be hard to accept, but its true. The medical cartel, at the highest level, is not out to help people, it is out to harm them, to weaken them. To kill them. At one point in my career, I had a long conversation with a man who occupied a high government position in an African nation. He told me that he was well aware of this. He told me that WHO is a front for these depopulation interests
— Jon Rappoport interview with ex-vaccine Researcher
The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care & reproductive health services, we could LOWER that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.
— Bill Gates
He conveyed a strange impression of being in safety, and completely secure. He had a courteous little manner with him, and smiled and nodded, as I pointed out the hills and the tall trees to him, as if he were interested in everything, and incapable of surprise at anything. I wondered if this consistency was produced by an entire ignorance of the evil of the world, or by a deep knowledge and acceptance of it.
— Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
And you have to be careful with illusionists: sometimes evil deceives us by assuming the simplest form of things.
— Donato Carrisi, The Whisperer
Well, no one says you can be happy about everything," I said. "I know I should be glad for you, Megan, but frankly I think you're crazy. And if Reverend Marshall is making you this way, I think he's evil. This life, this everyday existence, is the one gift we're given. To throw it away, to want to be dead, to me that's the sin.
— Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It
When you stopped believing in God," he went on, "did you stop believing in good and evil?""No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.
— Philip Pullman
Denial and rejection is one of the most powerful weapons that can turn a man into an evil.
— M.F. Moonzajer
All his court were cast down in slumber, and all the fires faded and were quenched; but the Silmarils in the crown on Morgoth's head blazed forth suddenly with a radiance of white flame; and the burden of that crown and of the jewels bowed down his head, as though the world were set upon it, laden with a weight of care, of fear, and of desire, that even the will of Morgoth could not support. Then Lúthien catching up her winged robe sprang into the air, and her voice came dropping down like rain into pools, profound and dark. She cast her cloak before his eyes, and set upon him a dream, dark as the outer Void where once he walked alone.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
How do we still believe that human nature is not evil when 60 years old men rape 3 years innocent girls?
— M.F. Moonzajer
Evil takes only prisoners….Time takes none."From The Tenth, chapter 28.
— Various
All our good is apparently from God, because we are first naked and holy without any good, and afterwards enriched with all good.
— Jonathan Edwards
If truth is not objective, there is no good or evil. There is only what people do and how people feel about it.
— Rebecca McKinsey
No one was meant to see hell before they got there. No one should have to live with the devil. So many homilies on faith were ruined once you no longer required it for belief.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves
The Patrician took a sip of his beer. “I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining on mother and children. And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.
— Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
She was rage and vengeance, wrath and malice, in beautifully twisted human form.
— Kami Garcia
What is worse than doing evil, is being evil” (Ethics, p.67). To lie is wrong, but what is worse than the lie is the liar, for the liar contaminates everything he says, because everything he says is meant to further a cause that is false. The liar as liar has endorsed a world of falsehood and deception, and to focus only on the truth or falsity of his particular statements is to miss the danger of being caught up in his twisted world. This is why, as Bonhoeffer says, that “(i)t is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie” (Ethics, p.67).
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury....
— Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
The most terrifying part was that the evil dwelling in those eyes could've gone unnoticed by many.
— Sidney Knight, Alex
Physical pain was easy. It would always pass in the end. All it needed was time - a ticking clock.
— Sidney Knight, Alex
Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad - when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was, alone - unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.(Dracula's Guest)
— Bram Stoker, Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories
["F]or it's not possible," [Socrates] said, "for anybody to experience a greater evil than hating arguments. Hatred of arguments and hatred of human beings come about in the same way. For hatred of human beings arises from artlessly trusting somebody to excess, and believing that human being to be in every way true and sound and trustworthy, and then a little later discovering that this person is wicked and untrustworthy - and then having this experience again with another. And whenever somebody experiences this many times, and especially at the hands of just those he might regard as his most intimate friends and comrades, he then ends up taking offense all the time and hates all human beings and believes there's nothing at all sound in anybody.
— Plato, Phaedo
If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.
— John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
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
Lucifer was quite right when he said he had the most powerful force against good at his disposal. Powerful factions of the world were siding with him. They were unaware, but the devil cared nothing for whether they knew or not. One day they would know, however. For an eternity. That thought pleased him greatly.
— Lee  Goff, A Rage Like Thunder
Evil" is an inverted anagram of "live." As we live our life, learn to tame our own private demons and conquer evil with a good, pure, humble, courageous, patient heart.
— Angelica Hopes
I feel that some people have a hard time with the truths around us, not only the sexual abuse by priests, but all bad things. I call it chosen ignorance. This modified form of ignorance is found in people who, if confronted with certain truths realize that they have to accept them and thereby acknowledge evil, and that scares them. Opening up and letting the truth in might knock them off their perceived center. It is too hard, period.
— Charles L. Bailey Jr., In the Shadow of the Cross
I don't want to say Monsanto is evil right off the bat, but why is Monsanto so evil?
— Bill Maher
But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man's-land, over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood's red bugles. To be alone and evil! To be a god at bay. What was more absolute?
— Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast
Evil is thus a kind of parasite on goodness. If there were no good by which to measure things, evil could not exist. Men sometimes forget this, and say, there is so much evil in the world that there cannot be a God. They are forgetting that, if there were no God, they would have no way of distinguishing evil from goodness. The very concept of evil admits and recognizes a Standard, a Whole, a Rule, an Order. Nobody would say that his automobile was out of order if he did not have a conception of how an automobile ought to run.
— Fulton J. Sheen
If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy
— Boethius
For My people are foolish, They know Me not; They are stupid children And have no understanding. They are shrewd to do evil, But to do good they do not know.
— Jeremiah 4 22
War is the most evil kind of human approach
—  unless it is for good cause.
Speak of evil, and you summon it.
— Rae Carson, The Shadow Cats
An apparent misfortune of man is that neither good nor evil is an agency itself; both are equally passive choices. Man himself is the ultimate agency. He has the power to realize and activate the dead options. Only then, that is, by the action of Will, good results in good and evil in evil.
— Raheel Farooq
If Christ has died for me, I cannot trifle with the evil that killed my best Friend.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Richard Dawkins regards faith as an evil to be eliminated; he takes all religious faith to be blind faith. (Dawkins says) ‘Scientific belief is based on publicly checkable evidence, religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its joy, shouted from the rooftops.’ However, taking Dawkins own advice we ask: where is the evidence that religious faith is not based on evidence? Mainstream Christianity will insist that faith and evidence are inseparable. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence. The apostle Paul says what many pioneers of modern science believed, that nature itself is part of the evidence for the existence of God ,‘ Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities- his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. So that men are without an excuse.’ Dawkins’ definition of faith turns out to be the direct opposite of the biblical one. Curious that he does not seem to be aware of the discrepancy.
— John C. Lennox
Evil in general does not sleep, and therefore doesn't see why anyone else should.
— Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.
— Marisha Pessl, Night Film
There are people whose souls have just withered, people who are willing to go along with anything evil - anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power.
— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.
— Sam Keen, The Denial of Death
Only the wicked understand the ways of the wicked, my dear. ~Madame Zelda to Roller Deb
— Red Tash, Troll Or Derby
Thus, death begets death; evil begets evil.
— Lloyd Alexander, The Black Cauldron
Nothing in the world delights a truly religious people so much as consigning them to eternal damnation.
— James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
That love, which is the highest joy, which is divine simplicity itself, is not for you moderns, you children of reflection. It works only evil in you. As soon as you wish to be natural, you becomecommon. To you nature seems something hostile; you have made devils out of the smiling gods of Greece, and out of me a demon. You can only exorcise and curse me, or slay yourselves in bacchantic madness before my altar. And if ever one of you has had the courage to kiss my red mouth, he makes a barefoot pilgrimage to Rome in penitential robes and expects flowers to grow from his withered staff, while under my feet roses, violets, and myrtles spring up every hour, but their fragrance does not agree with you. Stay among your northern fogs and Christian incense; let us pagans remain under the debris, beneath the lava; do not disinter us.
— Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs
In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden-the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
As you begin to look deeply into the mystery of your own evolution, in place of good and evil you will find only stories, finished or unfinished.
— Eric Micha'el Leventhal
Encouraging virtue is better than suppressing vice.
— Raheel Farooq
All of nature, therefore, is good, since the Creator of all nature is supremely good. But nature is not supremely and immutably good as is the Creator of it. Thus the good in created things can be diminished and augmented. For good to be diminished is evil; still, however much it is diminished, something must remain of its original nature as long as it exists at all. For no matter what kind or however insignificant a thing may be, the good which is its 'nature' cannot be destroyed without the thing itself being destroyed. There is good reason, therefore, to praise an uncorrupted thing, and if it were indeed an incorruptible thing which could not be destroyed, it would doubtless be all the more worthy of praise. When, however, a thing is corrupted, its corruption is an evil because it is, by just so much, a privation of the good. Where there is no privation of the good, there is no evil. Where there is evil, there is a corresponding diminution of the good. As long, then, as a thing is being corrupted, there is good in it of which it is being deprived; and in this process, if something of its being remains that cannot be further corrupted, this will then be an incorruptible entity [natura incorruptibilis], and to this great good it will have come through the process of corruption. But even if the corruption is not arrested, it still does not cease having some good of which it cannot be further deprived. If, however, the corruption comes to be total and entire, there is no good left either, because it is no longer an entity at all. Wherefore corruption cannot consume the good without also consuming the thing itself. Every actual entity [natura] is therefore good; a greater good if it cannot be corrupted, a lesser good if it can be. Yet only the foolish and unknowing can deny that it is still good even when corrupted. Whenever a thing is consumed by corruption, not even the corruption remains, for it is nothing in itself, having no subsistent being in which to exist.
— Augustine of Hippo
He was the devil in a Sunday hat; he dressed and acted like a civil man, but inside he was just hatred and filth. Then, I guess after what I was planning to do to save a life, I wasn't too dissimilar to him.
— Mercy Cortez, Messy and Shattered
Thus, every entity, even if it is a defective one, in so far as it is an entity, is good. In so far as it is defective, it is evil.
— Augustine of Hippo
Moreover, man carries in his heart the desire always to wield his scientific knowledge in service of the greater good. He would of course never use it for destructive purposes. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! ...
— Jacques Tardi, The Arctic Marauder
It takes a certain amount of courage, he though, to face yourself and say with candor, I'm rotten. I've done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.
— Philip K. Dick
In this universe, even what is called evil, when it is rightly ordered and kept in its place, commends the good more eminently, since good things yield greater pleasure and praise when compared to the bad things. For the Omnipotent God, whom even the heathen acknowledge as the Supreme Power over all, would not allow any evil in his works, unless in his omnipotence and goodness, as the Supreme Good, he is able to bring forth good out of evil. What, after all, is anything we call evil except the privation of good? In animal bodies, for instance, sickness and wounds are nothing but the privation of health. When a cure is effected, the evils which were present (i.e., the sickness and the wounds) do not retreat and go elsewhere. Rather, they simply do not exist any more. For such evil is not a substance; the wound or the disease is a defect of the bodily substance which, as a substance, is good. Evil, then, is an accident, i.e., a privation of that good which is called health. Thus, whatever defects there are in a soul are privations of a natural good. When a cure takes place, they are not transferred elsewhere but, since they are no longer present in the state of health, they no longer exist at all.
— Augustine of Hippo, The Enchiridion on Faith Hope and Love
[Religion is] a fantasy [and is] completely empty of any explanatory content. It is also evil.
— Peter   Atkins
The Rochester group [of VOTF], however, was met with some concern as they found it hard to believe my account as it unfolded before them. I feel that some people have a hard time with the truths around us, not only the sexual abuse by priests, but all bad things. I call it chosen ignorance. This modified form of ignorance is found in people who, if confronted with certain truths realize that they have to accept them and thereby acknowledge evil, and that scares them. Opening up and letting the truth in might knock them off their perceived center. It is too hard, period."(VOTF - Voice of the Faithful - a Catholic group that wants to change the Church, keep the faith.)
— Charles L. Bailey Jr., In the Shadow of the Cross
Every man is an evil until he falls in love.
— M.F. Moonzajer
I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century
There's a power that comes with silence. I had grown to fear the unsaid thing. So it felt like a release to say it-to admit that the risk wasn't just inside our walls-it was inside my skin. I was willing to claw, scratch, and bleed until I'd found it.
— Ally Carter, Out of Sight, Out of Time
This is where you first failed us. You gave us minds and told us not to think. You gave us curiosity and put a booby-trapped tree right in front of us. You gave us sex and told us not to do it. You played three-card monte with our souls from day one, and when we couldn't find the queen, you sent us to Hell to be tortured for eternity. That was your great plan for humanity? All you gave us here was daisies and fairy tales and you acted like that was enough. How were we supposed to resist evil when you didn't even tell us about it?
— Richard Kadrey, Aloha from Hell
Okay, gang," I said, "according to blueprints, there's an elevator access panel on the east side of the building. We may get a little dirty, but—""I thought we'd just go through the doors," Liz said, flashing three beautifully engraved invitations and some wonderfully authentic fake IDs.The tickets were $20,000 each. The Secret Service had been vetting the guest list for weeks, so Bex and I stopped beneath a streetlamp and studied Liz."Do I even want to know where you got those?" I asked.Liz seemed to ponder it, and then she said, "No.
— Ally Carter, Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover
You are fifty different kinds of twisted.""Only fifty? Val, you wound me.
— Nenia Campbell, Horrorscape
& love is an evil word. Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean? An evol word.
— Amiri Baraka, The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle. The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
— Winston S. Churchill
You have to acknowledge evil, or you give it too much power over you.
— Patricia Briggs, Dragon Bones
Evil is the starry sky of the Good.
— Franz Kafka
Half of my life passed searching for the evil that makes me to do wrong things, until I found innocent evils trapped in me.
— M.F. Moonzajer
One great objection to the Old Testament is the cruelty said to have been commanded by God. All these cruelties ceased with death. The vengeance of Jehovah stopped at the tomb. He never threatened to punish the dead; and there is not one word, from the first mistake in Genesis to the last curse of Malachi, containing the slightest intimation that God will take his revenge in another world. It was reserved for the New Testament to make known the doctrine of eternal pain.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which the world cannot stand and be.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
nowhere in this universe does evil exist except in the mind of mankind. only man can take an idea or symbol which is so simple and innocent, and then twist it and corrupt it until it is something to hate or kill one another over.
— Andrew James Pritchard
Because that’s life, you know? Good and bad. You can’t have one without the other. The bad brings out the good in us, and the good can be corrupted by the bad. It’s always a struggle—to fight for the good, so it tips the scale. - Jet Phoenix
— Rachael Wade, Repossession
But evil is always illusion. It insists on the lie that we can have something for ourselves. This is the sole principle at work in hell. Lucifer chose to believe it; or, since it is unimaginable that he actually could have believed it, then we may say that he chose to pretend it might be. Very well, says Truth, you may pretend this. But the pretense will be, literally, your undoing. It will unmake you. You will have opted for something that is not, namely, a lie. Hell is built of lies.
— Thomas Howard, Evangelical is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament
You answer to none but the whim of your own black heart.
— Joshua Winning, Sentinel
Generalization is a natural human mental process, and many generalizations are true—in average. What often does promote evil behavior is the lazy, nasty habit of believing that generalizations have anything at all to do with individuals.
— David Brin, Glory Season
Since evil is nothing positive, there can be no principle of evil. It has no meaning expect in reference to something good.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Philosophy of Science
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
— E.M. Forster
Too bad that miserable tribe died with their secrets.” Tossing the crystal across the table, she announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, the kingdom of the gods is within our grasp.
— Feather Stone, The Guardian's Wildchild
I felt at one and the same time quite close, within reach of my hand, and yet an infinite distance away, an unknown world of goodness. Often Isa had said to me: 'You, who see nothing but evil.... You, who see evil everywhere....' It was true, and it was not true.
— François Mauriac, Viper's Tangle
A man, who does not commit an evil act either, has no opportunity or the stomach.
— M.F. Moonzajer
We sat on the dusty floor like that for what felt like hours, our legs intertwined in the kneeling position. Like the demon and the angel reaching for one another on Jet’s arm, I felt half of everything. Half pure, half used. Locked in a dark, beautiful embrace. One I wouldn’t wish on anyone yet one I wouldn’t ever reverse if given the chance.Not when it had the power to save a life. - Skylla Warden
— Rachael Wade, Repossession
The Bible itself can be used for both good and evil. That doesn't mean it's flawed. It means that it is perfect.
— Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle
Whatever the reason, too many are no longer willing to call evil by its name. There is no vision. And when there is no vision, the people perish.
— Glenn Beck
The lesser of two evils was still evil.
— Julie Kagawa, The Eternity Cure
Kira is evil ... There's no denying that ... But lately I've been starting to think of it more like this ... The real evil is the power to kill people. Someone who finds himself with that power is cursed. No matter how you use it, anything obtained by killing people can never bring true happiness.
— Tsugumi Ohba, Death Note, Vol. 3: Hard Run
An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.
— Alberto Moravia, Contempt
the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons
— Hannah Arendt
If God were to remove all evil from our world (but somehow leave human beings on the planet), it would mean that the essence of 'humanness' would be destroyed. We would become robots.Let me explain what I mean by this. If God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots.Let's take this a step further. Robots do not love. God created us with the capacity to love. Love is based upon one's right to choose to love. We cannot force others to love us. We can make them serve us or obey us. But true love is founded upon one's freedom to choose to respond.
— Billy Graham, Hope for Each Day: Words of Wisdom and Faith
We need to laugh at the irrationality of evil, for in doing so we deny evil's power over us, diminish its influence in the world, and tarnish the allure it has for some people.
— Dean Koontz, Life Expectancy
Only when holiness and worship meet can evil be conquered. For that, only the Christian message has the answer.
— Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message
[M]an cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short … there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.
— Joseph de Maistre, The Executioner
Everything about this is embarrassing" she said. "D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.
— Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife
The fatal error of much science fiction has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution, or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens, or the conquest of other planets, or the annihilation of half the world--in short, pretty nearly anything but the facing up to the integral and irredeemable nature of mankind--can bring about utopian situations. It is the old error of the externalization of evil.
— Brian W. Aldiss
It seems it doesn't pay to be good anymore, when people are short-changing you for evil.
— Anthony Liccione
Why didn't you tell me that evil could be so lighthearted?
— Margaret Peterson Haddix, Among the Enemy
It is not easy to explain why God permits evil; but it is impossible for an atheist to explain the existence of goodness. How could a spiritless, soul-less, cross-less, Godless universe become the center of faith, purity, sacrifice, and martyrdom? How can decency be the decent thing if there is no God? Since God is love, why should we be surprised that want of it should end in pain, hate, broken hearts, and war?
— Fulton J. Sheen, Fulton Sheen's Wartime Prayer Book
The best reason for committing loathsome and detestable acts--and let's face it, I am considered something of an expert in this field--is purely for their own sake. Monetary gain is all very well, but it dilutes the taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice. True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good--and we all know how rare that is...
— Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
God could learn a little about love and morality from us. If there’s anyone who needs redemption, it’s God.
— Logan Kain, The Dead Will Rise First
Twill be the end of us all when it comes...The moon will devour the sun...The sea will rise in a great wave and drown the world...The Realms will fall...Evil will crawl across the land.
— Sam J. Charlton, Journey of Shadows
Any time someone gives you drugs, the purpose is to subdue. Always. Whether it is from a dealer, a friend, your mother/brother/sister/son, or your government--especially your government--the intention is to subdue, and always to feed another motive. Why? Because in getting high, your power and your intellect are blunted. Can the motive ever be in your best interests? Governments notoriously use sex, drink, and drugs to subdue their people. Notoriously. And we're falling for it.
— Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle
Evil spawns mayhem while benevolence repairs
—  doing good comforts the living while prayers are extended to the one who attends to the dead.
Given his personality, I’d say exorcism makes perfect sense as a favored pastime.
— Nicki Elson, Divine Temptation
Procrastination is the kidnapper of souls, and the recruiting-officer of Hell.
— Edward Irving
We do what we enjoy, even if it is act of evil.
— M.F. Moonzajer
Evil is predicable
—  Good is paradoxical.
Touch not the fighting-dog without a glove.Give me a fighting-dog and I come alive.Fighting-dogs always meant more to Tom Mitchell than people.
— John Duncan, TERROR PIT BULLS born into a world of violence
Monsters don’t exist. It’s men you should be afraid of, not monsters.
— Niccolò Ammaniti, I'm Not Scared
It's our greed to extract more and more from good that turns it into evil.
— Amish Tripathi, The Oath of the Vayuputras
What is forgotten, however, is that many times the Good we create leads to Evil that will destroy us.
— Amish Tripathi, The Oath of the Vayuputras
It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Damned
It's not evil, Rand. I know something evil when I smell it. This isn't evil, it's just incredibly stupid.
— Robert Jordan, A Memory of Light
Three kinds of people get talked about: The fascinating, the freaks and the nefarious.
— Donna Lynn Hope, Willow
...it begins with isolation - demons always inhabit desolate places...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
The evil in the world must not make me doubt the existence of God. There could be no evil if there were no God. Before there can be a hole in a uniform, there must be a uniform; before there is death, there must be life; before there is error, there must be truth; before there is a crime, there must be liberty and law; before there is a war, there must be peace; before there is a devil, there must be a God, rebellion against whom made the devil.
— Fulton J. Sheen, Fulton Sheen's Wartime Prayer Book
This is the real Madame. I can see why she hides herself in accents and gems and exotic perfumes. I can see why she's grown to hate anything to do with love. She isn't evil or corrupt the way that Vaughn is. She's broken. Only broken.
— Lauren DeStefano, Sever
Meg,” he whispered. “It wouldn’t be real love if there weren’t the possibility for another response to him. If we couldn’t choose not to love him, then our love would be empty. That’s why there’s evil in this world, because there’s free choice in this world. He allows the one to prove the other.
— Laura Anderson Kurk, Glass Girl
The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe's guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had been told. They would not have wanted to know. As those who saw and ignored the smoke from the crematoria of Hitler's Germany, they did not want to know that their world was not as it seemed.
— Judith Spencer, Satans High Priest
For its survival, the satanic cult demanded secrecy and obedience while it made brutality, even killing, appropriate. Denial and disavowal were inevitable responses to required behaviors so bizarre as to seem unreal, even to those who enacted them. What they could not deny or disavow, they could distort. They could blame the victims, who deserved to die for fighting or crying or for failing to fight or cry. They found encouragement for such a stance in a general culture accustomed to blaming victims for their misfortunes, and in specific contact with child victims eager to blame themselves. By believing that victims had a choice when there was none, they could see victims as culpable. They could even see the deaths as right and purposeful in the nobility of sacrifice.
— Judith Spencer, Satans High Priest
The novelist Dumas would one day borrow features from both of his uncles, not to mention his grandfather, the acknowledged scoundrel, in fashioning the central villains of The Count of Monte Cristo. Reading court documents detailing the sordid unraveling of Charles's sham fortune, which would have devastating effects on his daughter and her unsuspecting husband, I couldn't help thinking that one of the interesting things about Dumas's villains is that, while greedy and unprincipled themselves, they produce children who can be innocent and decent. This was something that the writer understood very well from his own family.
— Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
Keep in mind the roots of violence: Lust, envy, anger, avarice, and vengeance...the taproot...the killer's ultimate and truest motivation...is the hatred of truth...the hatred of truth is a vice. From it comes pride and an enthusiasm for disorder.
— Dean Koontz, Your Heart Belongs to Me
A world compelled to good alone is as much a shrine to compulsion as a world compelled to evil only.The Twenty-first Voyage
— Stanisław Lem, The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy
...nobody ever takes from the desert anything but aridity and monsters...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
...evil fascinates and repels us - it's a terrible beauty that enthralls us the more we stare into it...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Patrice had long since buried the particulars of events so painful that they caused her to resolve only to see good. With such a stance, such as dissociative split, she could walk with evil and believe it did not exist. She was Joe's perfect mate.
— Judith Spencer, Satans High Priest
It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye.("For The Rest Of Her Life")
— Cornell Woolrich, Angels of Darkness
Evil's when you push your agenda over someone else's. When you assert your beliefs over somebody's contrary beliefs. That's evil.
— David Kitson, Turing Evolved