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

"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." -

"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." -

"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." -

"Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin." - Aesop NULL

"Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin." -

"Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin." -

"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding." - Albert Camus

"The evil that is in this world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding." - Albert Camus

"The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding." -

"The evil that is in this world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding." -

"Charity is disinterested, seeking no reward, nor allowing itself to be diminished by any return of evil for its good." -

"Good is that which makes for unity; Evil is that which makes for separateness." -

"Charity is disinterested, seeking no reward, nor allowing itself to be diminished by any return of evil for its good." -

"Good is that which makes for unity; Evil is that which makes for separateness." -

"Charity is disinterested, seeking no reward, nor allowing itself to be diminished by any return of evil for its good." -

"Good is that which makes for unity; Evil is that which makes for separateness." -

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, fully Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, fully Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart." -

"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -

"The common character of all evil is that its realization in fact involves that there is some concurrent realization of a purpose towards elimination. The purpose is to secure the avoidance of evil. The fact of the instability of evil is the moral order in the world." - Alfred North Whitehead

"The fact of instability of evil is the moral order of the world." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Goodness must be denied a place among the aims of art. For Goodness is a qualification belonging to the constitution of reality, which in any of its individual actualizations is better or worse. Good and evil lie in depths and distances below and beyond appearance. They solely concern inter-relations within the real world. The real world is good when it is beautiful. Art has essentially to do with perfections attainable by purposeful adaptation of appearance." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Evil is the brute motive force of fragmentary purpose, disregarding the eternal vision. Evil is overruling, retarding, hurting. The power of God is the worship He inspires. The worship of God is not a rule of safety – it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure." - Alfred North Whitehead

"The kingdom of heaven is not the isolation of good from evil. It is the overcoming of evil by good. God has in his nature the knowledge of evil, of pain, and of degradation, but it is there as overcome with what is good." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil." -

"Evil is it when the heart vanquishes the soul. Evil, too, when emotion vanquishes the mind." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Evil destroys even itself, and if it is complete becomes unbearable." - Aristotle NULL

"The good man should be a lover of self (for he will both himself profit by doing noble acts, and will benefit his fellows), but the wicked man should not; for he will hurt both himself and his neighbors, following as he does evil passions." - Aristotle NULL

"Elderly Men... have lived many years; they have often been taken in, and often made mistakes; and life on the whole is a bad business. The result is that they are sure about nothing and under-do everything. They ‘think,’ but they never ‘know’; and because of their hesitation they always add a ‘possibly’ or a ‘perhaps’, putting everything this way and nothing positively. They are cynical; that is, they tend to put the worse construction on everything. Further, their experience makes them distrustful and therefor suspicious of evil. Consequently they neither love warmly nor hate bitterly, but... love as though they will some day hate and hate as though they will some day love. They are small-minded, because they have been humbled by life: their desires are set upon nothing more exalted or unusual than what will help them to keep alive... They live by memory rather than by hope; for what is left to them of life is but little as compared with the long past; and hope is of the future, memory of the past... Old men may feel pity, as well as young men, but not for the same reason. Young men feel it out of kindness; old men out of weakness, imagining that anything that befalls anyone else might easily happen to them." - Aristotle NULL

"Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil." - Aristotle NULL

"If you really want to know a man, give him power. The evil man will become proud, but the good man will become more humble than he was before." - Aristotle NULL

"Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil - and, if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty." - Aristotle NULL

"A human being may be defined as a personality with a will of its own capable of making moral choices between good and evil." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"In an age in which mankind’s collective power has suddenly been increased, for good or evil, a thousandfold through the tapping of atomic energy, the standard of conduct demanded from ordinary human beings can be no lower than the standard in times past by rare saints." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"In an age in which mankind’s collective power has suddenly been increased, for good or evil, a thousand-fold through the tapping of atomic energy, the standard of conduct demanded from ordinary human beings can be no lower than the standard attained in times past by rare saints." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"Our generic evil of an institution of any kind is that people who have identified themselves with it are prone to make an idol of it." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"The best antidote against evils of all kinds, against the evil thoughts that haunt the soul, against the needless perplexities which distract the conscience, is to keep hold of the good we have. Impure thoughts will not stand against pure words and prayers and deeds. Little doubts will not avail against great certainties. Fix your affections on things above, and then you will less and less be troubled by the cares, the temptations, the troubles of things on earth." - Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, known as Dean Stanley

"In the heart - pure being: “Isness alone is.” Outwardly - flow of events: “A dance, a rhythm.” Between - an evil ghost: “The impostor me,” who seems the very hub and first of things, but, scrutinized, dissolves and is not there. Pure being in the heart - be this, be still; flow of events without - cognize, accept; the evil ghost - be vigilant, expel; this is the path and all the wisdom of it." - Arthur W Osborn

"The widespread modern rejection of ritual in religion is depriving people of powerful aids for spiritual development and for defense against evil... Action cannot lead beyond action, and therefore no ritual can produce Liberation... But there are many who do not specifically seek Liberation but simply greater purity, greater devotion, general spiritual betterment, or who seek Liberation as the still unseen goal of a winding path; and it is for such as these that the appropriate ritual would be a powerful armament for progress and defense." - Arthur W Osborn

"Of all “evils” death is the most feared although it is the fate of all creatures. It is so natural that reason tells us it must be good. Death is not lifelessness, but life in motion. Our essential being cannot die because it was never born. Only its representations appear and disappear in the chronological sequences we call incarnations. If death is the prelude to life in other forms it ceases to be “evil” but becomes the means for releasing consciousness is that it may express itself in other and more diverse fields." - Arthur W Osborn

"If you would keep young and happy, be good; live a high moral life; practice the principles of the brotherhood of man; send out good thoughts to all, and think evil of no man. This is in obedience to the great natural law; to live otherwise is to break this great Divine law. Other things being equal, it is the cleanest, purest minds that live long and are happy. The man who is growing and developing intellectually does not grow old like the man who has stopped advancing, but when ambition, aspirations and ideals halt, old age begins." - Author Unknown NULL

"If money is the root of all evil, then why to churches beg for it?"" - Author Unknown NULL

"Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum

"Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum

"Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value -- and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum

"If a man has beheld evil, he may know that it was shown to him in order that he learn his own guilt and repent; for what is shown to him is also within him." -

"There no doubt is good in all the bitter woes that come upon us, because evil cannot proceed from God." - Baal Shem Tov, given name Yisroel ben Eliezer