Evil Quotes

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.

~ Mark Twain

The bad thing about being a famous comedian is that every now and then someone approaches me to tell an old joke. Don't tell me jokes - I have that. People also say the weirdest things, sometimes sarcastic things, and even evil things. They like to provoke to get a reaction.

~ Robin Williams

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

~ Xun Kuang

The greatest error of a man is to think that he is weak by nature, evil by nature. Every man is divine and strong in his real nature. What are weak and evil are his habits, his desires and thoughts, but not himself.

~ Ramana Maharshi

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.

~ Plato

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

~ Anatole France

The true nature of evil is that it is so very casual.

~ James St. James

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

~ John Berger

You and I are, by birth, by nature, and by choice, inwardly depraved, which is to say that we are entirely corrupt. That's not to say that we have no good in us; we do. However, anything good in us has been tainted with evil. It touches everything. Without the redeeming power of Christ we cannot halt our own moral slide.

~ Charles R. Swindoll

It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil.

~ James F. Cooper

Is there anything science should not try to explain? Science is knowledge and knowledge is power - power to do good or evil. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

~ Paul Davies

Science, as illustrated by the printing press, the telegraph, the railway, is a double-edged sword. At the same moment that it puts an enormous power in the hands of the good man, it also offers an equal advantage to the evil disposed.

~ Richard Jefferies

I'm enormously interested to see where neuroscience can take us in understanding these complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us about what does good and evil mean anyway, and what are those concepts about?

~ Francis Collins

Evil can be a teacher, if you look at the wisdom of its negative power.

~ Tom Brown

Love truly does have the power to transcend evil. It can get us through the most unspeakable of events and give us the strength to keep on putting one foot in front of the other.

~ Naomi Benaron

As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder and assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses... An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation.

~ Coretta Scott King

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

~ Plato

Cursed is the man who dies, but the evil done by him survives.

~ Abu Bakr

See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil... I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life.

~ Moses

The part that always shocked me was the inter-community violence among the chimps: the patrols and the vicious attacks on strangers that lead to death. It's an unfortunate parallel to human behavior - they have a dark side just as we do. We have less excuse, because we can deliberate, so I believe only we are capable of true calculated evil.

~ Jane Goodall

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.

~ Terry Pratchett

I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death.

~ Michel Houellebecq

The good news is that even though we walk through this valley of death, we don't have to fear, at least not for ourselves! Unfortunately, there is no way to skip over the valley altogether, we must face death and the evidence of evil all around us. But there will come a day... And what a day that will be!

~ Ted Dekker

Humans are insane. We kill our own people, starve our own people, sell them, work them to death, beat them, don't give them affordable/free/good healthcare, and let them live in misery, while a few of us have - we have all we want. We are evil.

~ Faith Hunter

The minute we stop learning, we begin death, the process of dying. We learn from each other with every action we perform. We are teaching goodness or evil every time we step out of the house and into the street.

~ Leo Buscaglia

Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

~ Plato

I'm not a pretty princess, and I'm aware of that, so I like music that is really intense, really bold, and characters that in a way almost have a dark side and are kind of evil because, for me, that's when I feel my strongest and fiercest, when I'm not necessarily the good girl.

~ Ashley Wagner

I think it takes a lot of trickery to keep up with the media and its perception of you. I don't know if I have it in me most of the time to care. The music is made first, and the interviews or photos to keep it alive come later as a necessary evil, I suppose.

~ Jack White

In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages.

~ Robert E. Lee

Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul.

~ André Maurois

In this life, we have to make many choices. Some are very important choices. Some are not. Many of our choices are between good and evil. The choices we make, however, determine to a large extent our happiness or our unhappiness, because we have to live with the consequences of our choices.

~ James E. Faust

An institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness.

~ Clara Barton

God dislikes evil, and no happiness can be built on hate. Love one another as brothers.

~ Josephine Baker

I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning.

~ P. J. O'rourke

Evil is a source of moral intelligence in the sense that we need to learn from our shadow, from our dark side, in order to be good.

~ John Bradshaw

For something to be completely evil is to be nothing. Satan has good attributes - intelligence, for instance - but they are corrupted. I cannot reconcile myself emotionally to alternative understandings of evil.

~ Scott Derrickson

We have an incredible warrior class in this country - people in law enforcement, intelligence - and I thank God every night we have them standing fast to protect us from the tremendous amount of evil that exists in the world.

~ Brad Thor

Dr. Evil got shortchanged in the first one. The family dynamic between Scott and Dr. Evil - the adventures of being an evil single parent - needed to be explored.

~ Mike Myers

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.

~ Plato