Wisdom Quotations

Evil

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.

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:
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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.