Quotes
Quotes about Evil
In the 1930s people went to see films not just to be entertained or to escape the dreariness of their workaday lives but to gain an education, to see the world, to learn table manners and interior decoration, how to dress, kiss, to laugh and cry, how to react to tragedy and happiness, how to be brave, evil and good.
To talk to someone who does not listen is enough to tense the devil. - Talking to Myself.
So spake the Fiend, and with necessity, The tyrant's plea, excused his devilish deed.
It is remarkable by how much a pinch of malice enhances the penetrating power of an idea or an opinion. Our ears, it seems, are wonderfully attuned to sneers and evil reports about our fellow men.
In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes, it strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a national will emerges from the scattered, specialized, or indifferent blocs of voters who ordinarily elect the politicians. Those are for good or evil the great occasions in a nation's history.
Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.
I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can't fool the neighbours.
Neutral men are the devil's allies.
Silent, grim, colossal, the Big City has ever stood against its revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that nothing of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still nobody should take offence. We would call nobody a lobster with good and sufficient claws.
George Washington, with his right art upraised, sits his iron horse at the lower corner of Union Square. . . . Should the General raise his left hand as he has raised his right, it would point to a quarter of the city that forms a haven for the oppressed and suppressed of foreign lands. In the cause of national or personal freedom they have found refuge here, and the patriot who made it for them sits his steed, overlooking their district, while he listens through his left ear to vaudeville that caricatures the posterity of the proteges.
. . . by evil report and good report . . .
For evil news rides post, while good news baits.
Night is a stealthy, evil Raven, Wrapt to the eyes in his black wings.
Pride is the master sin of the devil, and the devil is the father of lies.
Pain is no evil unless it conquers us.
There is no real evil in life, except great pain; all the rest is imaginary, and depends on the light in which we view things.
Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and the good, and dwell as little as possible on the evil and the false.
One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.
I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.
We pity in others only those evils which we have ourselves experienced.
Plato divinely calls pleasure the bait of evil, inasmuch as men are caught by it as fish by a hook. [Lat., Divine Plato escam malorum appeliat voluptatem, quod ea videlicet homines capiantur, ut pisces hamo.]
For florid prose, nor honied lies of rhyme, Can blazon evil deeds, or consecrate a crime.
Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
