This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The great man is powerful, involuntarily and composedly powerful, but he is not avid for power. What he is avid for is the realization of what he has in mind, the incarnation of the spirit. So long as a man's power is bound to the goal, the work, the calling, it is, in itself, neither good nor evil, only a suitable or unsuitable instrument. But as soon as this bond with the goal is broken off or loosened, and the man ceases to think of power as the capacity to do something, but thinks of it as a possession, then his power, being cut off and self-satisfied, is evil and corrupts the history of the world." - Martin Buber
"Natural law is a practical first principle in the sphere of morality; it forbids evil and commands good. Positive law is a decision that takes circumstances into account and conforms with natural law on credible grounds. The basis of natural law is God, who has created this light, but the basis of positive law is civil authority." - Martin Luther
"In what respect are we superior to brute creation, if intellect is not allowed to be the guide of passion? Brutes hope and fear, love and hate; but, without a capacity to improve, a power of turning these passions to good or evil, they neither acquire virtue nor wisdom. - Why? Because the Creator has not given them reason." - Mary Wollstonecraft
"We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living." - Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
"When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil." - Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
"When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” he uttered a very profound thought. But there are times in the history of peoples when thought alone does not prove their existence. A people may “think”: and yet its sons, with their thoughts and in spite of them, may be turned into a herd of slaves - or into soap. There are times when everything in you cries out: your very self-respect as a human being lies in your resistance to evil. We fight, therefore we are!" - Menachem Begin
"Everyone has power to do evil." - Menander, aka Menander of Athens NULL
"The evil of men is that they like to be teachers of others." - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
"The way of truth is like a great road. It is not difficult to know it. The evil is only that men will not seek it. Do you go home and search for it?" - Mencius, born Meng Ke or Ko NULL
"There is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"In truth there is no such thing in man’s nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Words so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions - between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, co-operativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation." - Norman Cousins
"War and Christianity are incompatible; you cannot conquer war by war; cast our Satan by Satan; or do the enormous evil of war that good may come of it." - Norman Thomas, fully Norman Mattoon Thomas
"Resist beginnings: it is too late to employ medicine when the evil has grown strong by inveterate habit." - Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
"Virtue and vice, evil and good, are siblings, or next-door neighbors, easy to make mistakes, hard to tell them apart." - Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
"Evil was made sweet to delude you. You have to use your discrimination to distinguish between poisoned honey and that which is in your best interest. Avoid those things that will ultimately hurt you, and choose those that will give you freedom and happiness." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"The character of human life, like the character of the human condition, like the character of all life, is "ambiguity": the inseparable mixture of good and evil, the true and false, the creative and destructive forces - both individual and social." - Paul Tillich, fully Paul Johannes Tillich
"We cannot leave behind us the sins of our past. We must not forget that nothing disappears. Everything is eternal. Everything that has been is still in existence. The whole history of humanity is the “history of crime”... Man must go back, seek for, and destroy the causes of evil however far back they lie. It is only in this idea that the hint of the possibilities of a general evolution can be found. It is only in this idea that the possibility of changing the karma of humanity lies, because changing the karma means changing the past... There will be no possibility of thinking of evolution of humanity, if the possibility did not exist for individually evolving man to go into the past and struggle against the causes of the present evil which lie there." - P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky
"Acceptance is not a state of passivity or inaction. I am not saying you can't change the world, right wrongs, or replace evil with good. Acceptance is, in fact, the first step to successful action. If you don't fully accept a situation precisely the way it is, you will have difficulty changing it. Moreover, if you don't fully accept the situation, you will never really know if the situation should be changed." - Peter McWilliams, fully Peter Alexander McWilliams
"Evil then results from imperfection." - Philip James Bailey
"No man voluntarily pursues evil, or that which he thinks is evil. To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the great when he may have the less." - Plato NULL
"To a good man nothing that happens is evil." - Plato NULL
"To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he may have the less." - Plato NULL
"For ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune." - Plato NULL
"For the fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretended knowledge of the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance?" - Plato NULL
"For the man who makes everything that leads to happiness, or near to it, to depend upon himself, and not upon other men, on whose good or evil actions his own doings are compelled to hinge, such a one, I say, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation; this is the man of manly character and of wisdom." - Plato NULL
"In youth good men often appear to be simple, and are easily practiced upon by the dishonest, because they have no examples of what evil is in their own souls." - Plato NULL
"The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." - Plato NULL
"It will never be possible to get rid of evil altogether, for there must always be something opposite to good." - Plato NULL
"Of all the things of a man’s soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good and injustice the greatest evil." - Plato NULL
"The fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good." - Plato NULL
"I'm trying to think, don't confuse me with facts. " - Plato NULL
"As small letters hurt the sight, so do small matters him that is too much intent upon them: they vex and stir up anger, which begets an evil habit in him in reference to greater affairs." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Medicine, to produce health, has to examine disease, and music, to create harmony, must investigate discord; and the supreme arts of temperance, of justice, and of wisdom, as they are acts of judgment and selection, exercised not on good and just and expedient only, but also on wicked, unjust, and inexpedient objects, do not give their commendations to the mere innocence whose boast is its inexperience of evil, and whose utter name is, by their award, simpleness and ignorance of what all men who live aright should know." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"The talkative listen to no one, for they are ever speaking. And the first evil that attends those who know not how to be silent, is, that they hear nothing." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Authority and place demonstrate and try the tempers of men, by moving every passion and discovering every frailty." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Philosophy finds talkativeness a disease very difficult and hard to cure. For its remedy, conversation, requires hearers: but talkative people hear nobody, for they are ever prating. And the first evil this inability to keep silence produces is an inability to listen." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"The omission of good is no less reprehensible than the commission of evil." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptations we resist." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Every sweet hath its sour, every evil its good... for every thing you gain, you lose something." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The first lesson of history is that evil is good." - Ralph Waldo Emerson