This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has not other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our mortal nature. Thus they become, as in the ancient fable, the harnessed steeds which bear the chariot of the sun." - Henry Ward Beecher
"It is a bitter thought to an avaricious spirit that by and by all these accumulations must be left behind. Wee can only carry away from this world the flavor of our good or evil deeds." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Whenever education and refinement grow away from the common people, they are growing toward selfishness, which is the monster evil of the world. that is true cultivation which gives us sympathy with every form of human life, and enables us to work most successfully for its advancement. Refinement that carries us away from our fellow-men is not God's refinement." - Henry Ward Beecher
"The way to avoid evil is not by maiming our passions, but by compelling them to yield their vigor to our moral nature." - Henry Ward Beecher
"If you speak evil, you yourself will soon be worse spoken of." - Hesiod NULL
"Evil counsel is most evil to him who gives it." - Hesiod NULL
"The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good." - Horace Mann
"Both poetry and philosophy are prodigal of eulogy over the mind which ransoms itself by its own energy from a captivity to custom, which breaks the common bounds of empire, and cuts a Simplon over mountains of difficulty for its own purpose, whether of good or of evil." - Horace Mann
"The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good." - Horace Mann
"There is no wickedness so desperate or deceptive - we can never foresee its consequences. Of all the evil spirits abroad in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous." - James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
"Let no man presume to think that he can devise any plan of extensive good, unalloyed and unadulterated with evil." - James Bryant Conant
"Evil unchecked grows, evil tolerated poisons the whole system." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"Pleasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity to pain, the only good; pain is in itself an evil; and, indeed, without exception, the only evil; or else the words good and evil have no meaning." - Jeremy Bentham
"Evil news rides post, while good news bates." - John Milton
"What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men’s evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice." - John Ruskin
"One of the greatest dangers... of democracy, as of all other forms of government, lies in the sinister interest of the holders of power: it is the danger of class legislation; of government intended for (whether really effecting it or not) the immediate benefit of the dominant class, to the lasting detriment of the whole. And one of the most important questions demanding consideration, in determining the best constitution of a representative government, is how to provide efficacious securities against this evil." - John Stuart Mill
"The most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power." - John Stuart Mill
"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, it would be an evil still." - John Stuart Mill
"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite." - Jorge Luis Borges
"An evil intention perverts the best actions, and makes them sins." - Joseph Addison
"A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer." - Joseph Addison
"When you are a man, you are in the field of time and decisions. One of the problems of life is to live with the realization of both terms, to say, "I know the center, and I know that good and evil are simply temporal aberrations and that, in God's view, there is no difference."" - Joseph Campbell
"Every newly discovered truth judges the world, separates the good from the evil, and calls on faithful souls to make sure of their election." - Julia Ward Howe
"What is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?" - Kahlil Gibran
"Evil natures never lack teachers." - Latin Proverbs
"We need to realize that money is not the ultimate power of the world. It is not money itself, but the love of money that is the root of all evil. If you let this love blot out courage, work, art, romance - then you are closing yourself into a narrower and narrower cage." - Lewis H. Lapham
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"No danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"An ignorant man believes that the whole universe exists only for him... If, therefore, anything happens to him contrary to his expectations, he at once concludes that the whole universe is evil." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Every fool thinks that life is there for his sake alone, and as though nothing existed but he. And so, when anything happens that opposes his wishes, he concludes that the whole universe is evil. But if man would regard the whole universe itself and realize what an infinitesimal part he plays in it, the truth would be clear and apparent to him." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"Every ignoramus imagines that all that exists, exists with a view to his individual sake; it is as if there were nothing that exists except him. And if something happens to him that is contrary to what he wishes, he makes the trenchant judgment that all exists is an evil." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"There are eight degrees in almsgiving… Supreme above all is to give assistance to a fellow man who has fallen on evil times by presenting him with a gift or loan, or entering into a partnership with him, or procuring him work, thereby helping him to become self-supporting. Next best is giving alms in such a way that the giver and recipient are unknown to each other. This is, indeed, the performance of a commandment from disinterested motives." - Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
"We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory." - Marcel Proust, fully Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust
"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." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil; nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest good." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The most learned men have told us that only the wise man is free. What is freedom but the ability to live as one will? The man who lives as he wills is none other than the one who strives for the right, who does his duty, who plans his life with forethought, and who obeys the laws because he knows it is good for him, and not out of fear. Everything he says, does, or thinks is spontaneous and free. His tasks and conduct begin and end in himself, because nothing has so much influence over him as his own counsel and decision. Even the supreme power of fortune is submissive to him. The wise poet has reminded us that fortune is molded for each man by the manner of his life. Only the wise man does nothing against his will, or with regret and by compulsion. Thought this truth deserves to be discussed at greater length, it is nevertheless proverbial that no one is free except the wise. Evil men are nothing but slaves." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"They do more harm by their evil example than by their actual sin." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Although physicians frequently know their patients will die of a given disease, they never tell them so. To warn of an evil is justified only if, along with the warning, there is a way of escape." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Every evil in the bud is easily crushed; as it grows older it becomes stronger." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"Guilt is the only evil; but no guilt accrues when the issue is one against which there are no guarantees." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"True law is right reason comfortably to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good." - Margaret Mead
"Man's great guilt does not lie in the sins he commits, for temptation is great and his strength is limited. Man's great guilt lies in the fact that he can turn away from evil at any moment, and yet he does not." - Martin Buber