Quotes on Evil

Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will

All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

Government is a necessary evil

There is no evil that the father’s love cannot pardon and cover, there is no sin that is a match for his grace.

The aim of torture is to destroy a person as a human being, to destroy their identity and soul. It is more evil than murder.

Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.

The Divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means whereby we learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it.

A large portion of our citizens, who will not believe, even on the evidence of facts, that any public evils exist, or are impending. They deride the apprehensions of those who foresee, that licentiousness will prove, as it ever has proved, fatal to liberty.

God created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning.

The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman's thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil.

Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the Elves, if once they dwelt there.

True knowledge of good and evil as we possess is merely abstract or general, and the judgment which we pass on the order of things and the connection of causes, with a view to determining what is good or bad for us in the present, is rather imaginary than real.

Though all afflictions are evils in themselves, yet they are good for us, because they discover to us our disease and tend to our cure.

What I want you to understand, is the full evil of those who claim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is a realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let them check their premises. Let them check their standards of value. Let them check - before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity - whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires.

People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.

Nothing is so rash as fear; and the counsels of pusillanimity very rarely put off, whilst they are always sure to aggravate, the evils from which they would fly.

Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity. That is where the true evil lies.

It is clear to us that, for good or for evil, our vitality is concentrated in our religion. You cannot change it. You cannot destroy it and put in its place another.

O magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! My South! O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!

The greatest of all evils is a weak government