A. J. Muste:

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

Albert Einstein:

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:

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

Aldous Huxley:

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:

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.

Barry Lopez:

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

Benjamin Haydon:

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

Blaise Pascal:

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

Blaise Pascal:

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:

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb, said, "They all feed one another," and called it good.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

Death? Why this fuss about death. Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! ... Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

Cicero:

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Edmund Burke:

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

Edmund Burke (attributed):

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

Epicurus:

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.

Ernest Becker:

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.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

Battle not with monsters
lest ye become a monster
and if you gaze into the abyss
the abyss gazes into you.

H. L. Mencken:

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

Hannah Arendt:

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 sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

Helen Keller:

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.

Henry Brooks Adam:

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

Henry David Thoreau:

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

Hierocles:

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.

James Baldwin:

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

Joseph Conrad:

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

Joseph Conrad:

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

Leonardo da Vinci:

He who does not punish evil, commands it to be done.

Mae West:

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.

Mairead Maguire:

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.

Martin Luther King, jr.:

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.:

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.

Mary Wollstonecraft:

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

Mary Wollstonecraft:

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

Michel de Montaigne:

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

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

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

Molly Ivins:

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.

Paramahansa Yogananda:

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.

Pascal:

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

Paul Ricoeur:

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.

Pearl S. Buck:

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

Raisa Gorbachev:

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

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.

Rene Descartes:

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

Robert Heinlein:

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard cold wisdom is required, too, for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil.

Scott Alexander:

All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy.

Soren Kierkegaard:

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.

Thomas Paine:

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

Unknown:

In this world everything changes except good deeds and bad deeds; these follow you as the shadow follows the body.

William Penn:

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.

William Shakespeare:

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