Best 5885 quotes in «evil quotes» category

Baumeister's point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls "the myth of pure evil." Of this myth's many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil.

Beauty is only skin deep but evil cuts straight through the soul.

Because a person couldn't ever be good and evil at once. Little girl, don't you know? The world is made up of shades of grey.

Because that’s life, you know? Good and bad. You can’t have one without the other. The bad brings out the good in us, and the good can be corrupted by the bad. It’s always a struggle—to fight for the good, so it tips the scale. - Jet Phoenix

Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great." [Six Questions for Slavoj Žižek, Harper's Magazine, November 11, 2011]

Because When you write about people, you inevitably offend--but if you write about animals, the evil do not recognize themselves but the good understand immediately.

Before Armand had granted me the esteem of which I have already spoken, I probably would not have betrayed him. The mere idea would have horrified me. So long as he had not given me his confidence, betraying him had no meaning: it meant simply obeying the elementary rule which governed my life. But now I loved him. I recognized his omnipotence. And though he might not love me, he contained me within him. His moral authority was so absolute, so generous, that it made intellectual rebellion within his bosom impossible. The only way I could prove my independence was by acting on the emotional level. The idea of betraying Armand set me aglow. I feared and loved him too much not to want to deceive and betray and rob him. I sensed the anxious pleasure that goes with sacrilege. If he were God (he had known pity), and had he been well pleased with me, it were sweet to deny him. And better still, that Stilitano, who did not love me and whom I would never have betrayed, should be helping me. His sharp personality aptly suggested the image of a dagger piercing the heart. The strength of the devil and his power over us lie in his irony. His seductiveness may be only his detachment. The force with which Armand denied the rules proved his own power—and the power of the rules over him. Stilitano smiled at them. His smile dissolved me. It was bold enough to express itself on a face of great beauty.

Being good is something that one must choose over and over again, every day, throughout the day, for the rest of one's life," Asher said. "A day is made of a thousand decisions, most small, some huge. With each decision you have the chance to work toward light, or sink toward darkness.

Believe in yourselves as sons and daughters of God, men and women with unlimited potential to do good in the world. Believe in personal virtue. There is no substitute for it anywhere under the. heavens. Believe in your power to discipline yourselves against the evils which could destroy you. Believe in one another as the greatest generation ever yet to live upon the earth.

Being Scared-off by Evil Lastly, we deny the presence of evil because we are terrified by the horrendously hurtful, cruel, and bloody kinds of evil people tell us about—if we are willing to listen. This was poignantly brought home during an interdisciplinary case conference involving a resident who was counseling for the first time a woman who had been sexually abused. As we worked with him, it became clear that he was resisting entering what he called the 'psychic cave" of her sealed—off experience from which she was shouting for assistance. Because of his resistance, he was not providing her the support and guidance she so desperately needed, and he was not facilitating her working through the abuse and hurt that were continuing to impact her life. As he was confronted about this at one point in the conference, he stated tearfully: "I'm afraid if I help her move into her memories. I will have to go with her, and if I go with her, my view of the world as a basically good and safe place will be shattered. I'm not sure I can handle that for myself, or be able to think about the fact that my wife and kids may be more vulnerable living in this world than I can be comfortable believing" (Means 1995, 299).

Best to live and love by the maxim that 'silence in the face of evil is evil itself', but when it's evil fighting evil, let evil kill itself.

Beware; satan visits you by the noises of negatively minded people. Hear, but don't act on it!

Beyond all judgments of good and bad ...is perfection - Vivian Amis

Be worried if you always flock in the company of people who peel off other people's skins with their teeth in their absence. A time will come when they'll try to pick a bite on you too!

Behind every villain is a truth, whether it be perceived or actual.

Believe that you are someone worth saving.

Biology is not destiny; you can be the child of an evil person and be a good person

Blessed is he who keeps his hands from doing evil.

Blake's song isn't really a song for England alone," said Dym. "It's a song for every land. We're all building the unseen Jerusalem together. But the powers of darkness don't want to see a time when the earth shall be filled with the glory of the God as the waters cover the sea.

Blind beliefs are the source of all evils.

Books allow us to escape from the pressures of modern life. By far, the best vehicles of escape are Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy genre allowing us to lose ourselves in worlds far away from the reality we know. This escapism works because we totally immerse ourselves and:- We become the hero or heroine. We are the ones who thwart evil. We laugh as we socialise with characters we have never met but feel they are as close as our family. We cry when we lose a good friend.

Both [Satan and Melkor/Morgoth] are loud in their defiance, claiming that they would "rather rule in hell than serve in heaven". One might have admired these rebel angels if one believed their defiance was in the name of liberty- however, both lied. Their rebellions were only provoked by envy and the usurpers' wishes to take the perceived tyrants' place. Never were two more natural tyrants than Morgoth and Satan.

Boy, you're good at figuring things out. Isn't he? Except that if anybody's the devil in this room it's _you_, buster." An extraordinary bitterness came into his face. "I've seen you before. I know you, all right, preacher man. Age after age, you come back. You always lead the crusades. You're so damned golden-tongued, other people just flock to die for your causes. You die with them, it's true, because you're stupid enough to believe your own great lies; but you always come back again somehow. Oh, I know _you_.

But everyone has some kind of power to hurt people.

Build the world on good not evil. Let your life spread good and be good. Do not find your success in evil deeds to others. Be good, find good.

...But first appearances are often deceptive. Not everything monstrous looking is evil, and not everything fair is good...and in every fairytale, there is a grain of truth.

But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of goodness, so why the other shop? If lewdies are good that's because they like it, and I wouldn't ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. And I was patronizing the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me or our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning tbey of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.

But della Rovere frowned and said, "Heed my warning, Guido Feltra. He's full of the devil, this son of the church.

But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a warfare of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man's-land, over the fields of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood's red bugles. To be alone and evil! To be a god at bay. What was more absolute?

But how conceive a God supremely good/ Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/ Yet scatters evil with as large a hand? [Written after an earthquake in Lisbon killed over 15,000 people]

But if all of the evil in the world makes you think that there might be a devil, Chris, how do you account for all the good?

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.

But evil is always illusion. It insists on the lie that we can have something for ourselves. This is the sole principle at work in hell. Lucifer chose to believe it; or, since it is unimaginable that he actually could have believed it, then we may say that he chose to pretend it might be. Very well, says Truth, you may pretend this. But the pretense will be, literally, your undoing. It will unmake you. You will have opted for something that is not, namely, a lie. Hell is built of lies.

Be very careful when you judge another human being. Do not measure anybody strictly based on the bad you see in them and ignore all the good. Be wary of any man who intentionally ignores another man's record of deeds or work history simply to impose their own agenda. Such a man's judgment lacks merit and should be disregarded immediately. Without a conscience, there is no truth in them.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

But remember, great Good will, more often than not, lead to great Evil.

But sometimes to keep Evil from getting in, you have to let Good out.

But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man.

But there is a difference between the systematic evil of totalitarianism and the ordinary corruption we find in all institutions, at all times. Totalitarianism is a system of highly organized murder and oppression, driven by ideology. American institutions, in comparison, were not created to facilitate mass murder and dictatorship.

By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange - meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

By doing the things that are noble, we become noble and by doing the things that are evil, we become evil.

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

Causation is the vicious form of all evil bothering around humans for centuries.

Celia Wird, have you no shame? Standing out there half-naked, flashing those young boys like some kind of streetwalker!" Aric's dark brows shot up to his crown. "What the fu--" "Mind your own business, you goddamn raisin with legs!" Taran screamed from inside the house. Mrs. Mancuso flipped me off, of course. Bren flashed her a panty-dropping grin. "It's okay, Mrs. M. I'll be sure to take Celia to confession later so Father O'Callaghan can slap the sin out of her." "Be sure that you do." Mrs. Mancuso gave Bren an approving nod, and me another stiff one. Aric remained fixed to my front walkway. He may have been a guardian of the earth, but I doubted he'd ever encountered evil the likes of Mrs. Mancuso.

Che cosa è male? Che cosa è bene? Che cosa bisogna amare, che cosa odiare? Per quale ragione dobbiamo vivere? E io che cosa sono? Che cos’è la vita? Che cos’è la morte? Quale forza guida tutto?» si domandava Pierre. E non trovava risposta ad alcuno di questi interrogativi, tranne una sola illogica risposta, che per contro non rispondeva affatto a queste domande. «Morirai e tutto sarà finito.

Christianity now is in crisis, and a large part because people have marketed it as a religion of good people getting better, when in fact it is religion a bad people coping with their failure to be good.

Christ can forgive you," he whispered, though he didn't believe it. There wasn't a hint of compassion in those ice-blue eyes. "That's grand," she said. Her features became again those of the pleasant brown-haired nurse. She smiled, pulled the pillow from under his head, and covered his face.

[Christ’s] goodness is still a rebuke to our badness; His purity still shows up our impurities; His sinlessness still reveals our sinfulness; and unless we allow [Jesus] to destroy the evil within us, the evil within us still wants to destroy Him. This is the conflict of the ages.

Christians need to take a stand for what is right and not let evil go unchallenged.

Christmas is not a reminder that the world is really quite a nice old place. It reminds us that the world is a shockingly bad old place, where wickedness flourishes unchecked, where children are murdered, where civilized countries make a lot of money by selling weapons to uncivilized ones so they can blow each other apart. Christmas is God lighting a candle, and you don't light a candle in a room that's already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that's so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are. The light shines in the darkness, says St. John, and the darkness has not overcome it.