That it is a bad thing to be tortured and starved, humiliated or hurt, is not an opinion; it is a fact. That it is better for people to be loved and attended to, rather than hated or neglected, is again a plain fact, not a matter of opinion.

- G. J. Warnock

Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes.

- Louisa May Alcott

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

- Aristotle

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about "right" and "wrong," or "good" and "evil," and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?

- Sam Harris

Even in evil, that dark cloud which hangs over the creation, we discern rays of light and hope, and gradually come to see in suffering and temptation proofs and instruments of the sublimest purposes of wisdom and love.

- William Ellery Channing

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

- Margaret Mead

It is in the Earth's green covering of grass;
In the blue serenity of the Sky;
In the reckless exuberance of Spring;
In the severe abstinence of gray Winter;

- Rabindranath Tagore

Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us.

- Eric Hoffer

Is god willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him god?

- Epicurus

Wickedness sucks in the greater part of its own venom, and poisons itself therewith.

- Michel de Montaigne

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil;
With them forgive yourself.

- William Shakespeare

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.

- Baruch Spinoza

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

- Aldous Huxley



The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

- Rene Descartes



We frail humans are at one time capable of the greatest good and, at the same time, capable of the greatest evil. Change will only come about when each of us takes up the daily struggle ourselves to be more forgiving, compassionate, loving, and above all joyful in the knowledge that, by some miracle of grace, we can change as those around us can change too.

- Mairead Maguire



The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.

- A. J. Muste



In seeking to avoid evil, [humanity] is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is [our] ingenuity, rather than [our] animal nature, that has given [our] fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.

- Ernest Becker



Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.

- Epicurus



Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.

- Baruch Spinoza



There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

- Henry David Thoreau



Man is neither angel nor brute, and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.

- Pascal



Life has a bright side and a dark side, for the world of relativity is composed of light and shadows. If you permit your thoughts to dwell on evil, you yourself will become ugly. Look only for the good in everything so you absorb the quality of beauty.

- Paramahansa Yogananda



I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

- Blaise Pascal



The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary: men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

- Joseph Conrad



To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.

- Paul Ricoeur



Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

- James Baldwin



I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.



Hypocrisy, the lie, is the true sister of evil, intolerance, and cruelty.

- Raisa Gorbachev



The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

- Albert Einstein



What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

- Hannah Arendt



The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. (attributed)

- Edmund Burke



It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

- H. L. Mencken



No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

- Mary Wollstonecraft



The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

- Joseph Conrad



We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.

- Hierocles



The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.

- Pearl S. Buck



If your heart acquires strength, you will be able to remove blemishes from others without thinking evil of them.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi



Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

- Blaise Pascal



Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings.

- Helen Keller



At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

- Aldous Huxley



How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

Arctic Dreams

- Barry Lopez