Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Evil

"Love suffereth long and is kind. Love envieth not - seeketh not her own. Thinketh no evil, beareth all things. Believeth all things. Hopeth all things. Love never faileth." - Saint Paul, aka The Apostle Paul, Paul the Apostle or Saul of Tarsus NULL

"We are not born in our full development but with a capacity for good an evil; we are begotten as well without virtue as without vice, and before the activity of our own personal will there is nothing in man but what God has stored in him." - Pelagius NULL

"Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil." - William Penn

"If it be an evil to judge rashly or untruly any single man, how much a greater sin it is to condemn a whole people." - William Penn

"The exit of evil works the entrance of virtue." -

"The love of money is the mother of all evil." -

"It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff

"Creation is not an instantaneous act, but is an eternal process. The immanence of God which follows from this hypothesis is the pledge that evil and error, ugliness and imperfection are not ultimate. Evil has reference to the distance which good has to traverse. Error is the stage on the pathway to truth." - Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

"In all conflict with evil, the method to be used is love and not force. When we use evil methods to defeat evil, it is evil that wins." - Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

"Truth does not do so much good in the world, as the appearance of it does evil." -

"Fear is the anticipation and expectation of evil or pain, as contrasted with hope which is the anticipation of good. Awe, on the other hand, is the sense of wonder and humility inspired by the sublime or felt in the presence of mystery. Fear is “a surrender of the succors which reason offers,” awe is the acquisition of insights which the world holds in store for us. Awe, unlike fear, does not make us shrink from the awe-inspiring object, but, on the contrary, draws us near to it. That is why awe is compatible with both love and joy." - Fritz A. Rothschild

"It is precisely the conflict between the good or divine principle, on the one hand, and the evil or adverse principle on the other, which constitutes the meaning of human life and human history, from the beginning to the end of time." - Karl Wilheim Friedrich Schlegel, later Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel

"We will never comprehend why the infinite will, in order to realize its completion, requires the incomplete, or how evil can result in good. No forced attempt to reason out these events can give us peace of God. There is a different way, a way born from inward experience. We may not have been given the privilege of understanding how events are expressing the will of God. But one thing we do know, and on that knowledge all else depends – the will of God is directed only toward one thing: the spiritual." - Albert Schweitzer

"Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph." - Haile Selassie

"What is the worst thing the Evil Urge can achieve? To make man forget that he is the son of a king." - Shlomo of Karlin, fully Rabbi Shlomo HaLevi of Karlin NULL

"Deal firmly, yet tenderly, with evil, as if it were a disease in your own person, and the people will entirely put away their faults." -

"There is no other reward but nearness to God, and there is no other punishment but estrangement from God. God does not reward us with wealth; God does not punish us with sickness. The good have suffered sickness and the evil have enjoyed wealth. The reward of a good life is goodness, and the reward of an evil life is evil. Kinship with God, or estrangement from God – that is Providence." -

"The scapegoat is necessary as a symbol of evil which it is convenient to cast out of the social order and, which, through its very being, confirms the remaining members of the community as good." -

"He who accuses another of being an evil person says so because he is afraid of him." - Muhammed al-Taqī or Muhammad al-Jawād, given name Muhammad ibn ‘Alī ibn Mūsā

"This day only is ours, we are dead to yesterday, and we are not yet born to the morrow. But if we look abroad and brings into one day's thoughts the evil of many, certain and uncertain, what will be and what will never be, our load will be as intolerable as it is unreasonable." - Jeremy Taylor

"Progress towards the welfare of mankind is made not by the persecutors but by the persecuted… Only goodness, meeting evil and not infected by it, conquers evil." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi

"Many will receive great help, and many will be entirely healed by a practice somewhat after the following nature: Wit a mind at peace, and with a heart going out in love to all, go into the quiet of your own interior self, holding the thought - I am one with the Infinite Spirit of Life, the life of my life. I then as spirit, I a spiritual being, can in my own real nature admit of no disease. I now open my body, in w2hich disease has obtained a foothold, I open it fully to the inflowing tide of this Infinite Life, and it now, even now, is pouring in and coursing through my body, and the healing process is going on. Realize this so fully that you begin to feel a quickening and a warming glow imparted by the life forces to the body. Believe the healing process is going on. Believe it, and hold continually to it. Many people greatly desire a certain thing but expect something else. They have greater faith in the power of evil than in the power of good, and hence they remain ill." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"No disease can enter into or take hold of our bodies unless it finds therein something corresponding to itself which makes it possible. And in the same way, no evil or undesirable condition of any kind can come into our lives unless there is already in them that which invites it and so makes it possible for it to come. the sooner we begin to look within ourselves for the cause of whatever comes to us, the better it will be, for so much sooner will we begin to make conditions within ourselves such that only good may enter." - Ralph Waldo Trine

"We don’t want apartheid liberalized. We want it dismantled. You can’t improve something that is intrinsically evil." - Desmond Tutu, fully Desmond Mpilo Tutu

"Temperance is not the absence of passion, but is the transfiguring of passion into wholeness. Without it... you will have the senses usurping sovereignty and excluding the spirit; you will have them deciding good and evil and excluding God." - Gerald Vann

"The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL

"Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil. The opposite of love is not hate, its indifference." - Elie Wiesel, fully Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel

"Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil." -

"I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil." - Albert Einstein

"Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society. The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil." - Albert Einstein

"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing." - Albert Einstein

"This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career." - Albert Einstein

"offers the image of a chariot in which the driver uses an obedient lead horse to control another wayward horse; that is, cool reason may know the Good but cannot control the passions without a passionate ally - without a spirit that loves the Good and greets evil with moral indignation." - James R. Flynn, aka Jim Flynn

"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good." -

"War is an unmitigated evil. But it certainly does one thing: It drives away fear and brings bravery to the surface." -

"What makes the United States special in the history of nations is our commitment to the rule of law and our carefully constructed system of checks and balances. Our national distrust of concentrated power and our devotion to openness and democracy are what have led us as a people to consistently choose good over evil in our collective aspirations." - Al Gore, Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr.,

"I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth." - Molly Ivins, fully Mary Tyler "Molly" Ivins

"An integral part of possessing a genuine moral clarity may be to recognize that rarely, if ever, does any moral situation boil down to an instance of absolute good versus absolute evil...Genuine moral clarity involves ceaseless and rigorous questioning and evaluation of one's works and deeds and ends in life, and the means one chooses to realize one's works and deeds and ends." - Christopher R. Phillips

"Be good with reason, but never do evil." - Malaysian Proverbs

"Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil." -

"Our repentance is not so much regret for the evil we have done as fear of what may happen to us because of it." -

"Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil." - Albert Schweitzer

"Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson

"Nature is neutral. Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. there is no evil in the atom; only in men’s souls." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson

"Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson

"Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls." -

"Nature is neutral. Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. there is no evil in the atom; only in men’s souls." -

"Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse." -