Quotes on Evil

The beginning of pride and hatred lies in worldly desire, and the strength of your desire if from habit. When an evil tendency becomes confirmed by habit, rage is triggered when anyone restrains you.

Philosophy takes as her aim the state of happiness...she shows us what are real and what are only apparent evils. She strips men's minds of empty thinking, bestows a greatness that is solid and administers a check to greatness where it is puffed up and all an empty show; she sees that we are left no doubt about the difference between what is great and what is bloated.

We are unreasonably desirous to separate the goods of life from those evils which Providence has connected with them, and to catch advantages without paying the price at which they are offered to us. Every man wishes to be rich, but very few have the powers necessary to raise a sudden fortune, either by new discoveries, or by superiority of skill in any necessary employment; and among lower understandings many want the firmness and industry requisite to regular gain and gradual acquisitions.

All that is good is not embodied in the law; and all that is evil is not proscribed by the law. A well-disciplined society needs few laws; but it needs strong mores.

Pity is often a reflection of our own evils in the ills of others. It is a delicate foresight of the troubles into which we may fall.

If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the bad to suspect good.

Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the first case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost.

Oh that I was lowly in heart! Honor and dishonor, good report and evil report would then be alike, and prove a furtherance to me in my Christian cause.

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

Evil men by their own nature cannot ever prosper.

Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

As we look into the future, we are going to need to be stronger and more responsible for our choices in a world where people "call evil good, and good evil." We do not choose wisely if we use our agency in opposition to God's will or to priesthood counsel. Tomorrow's blessings and opportunities depend on the choices we make today.

The white man is not inherently evil, but America's racist society influences him to act evilly. The society has produced and nourishes a psychology which brings out the lowest, most base part of human beings.

Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.

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

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

The worst evil of all is to leave the ranks of the living before one dies.

Why, do you not know, then, that the origin of all human evils, and of baseness, and cowardice, is not death, but rather the fear of death?