The snake stood up for evil in the Garden.
- Robert Frost

Evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
- Dark Helmet, Spaceballs

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard cold wisdom is required, too, for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom invariably accomplishes evil.
- Robert Heinlein

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

On the choice of friends, Our good or evil name depends.
- John Gay

Those that are evil have not only the good against them, but also the bad.
- Bischer

Without evil there would be no good, so it must be good to be evil sometimes.
- Satan, Up There, South Park Bigger, Longer, Uncut

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
- Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
- Hannah Arendt

The cemetery of the victims of human cruelty in our century is extended to include yet another vast cemetery, that of the unborn.
- John Paul II

Never let a man imagine that he can pursue a good end by evil means, without sinning against his own soul. The evil effect on himself is certain.
- Robert Southey

The evil that men do lives after them./The good is oft interred with their bones.
- William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2, Line 81

The devil personifies not the nature that is around us but the nature that is within us - the infinitely ferocious and cunning prehuman creature that is still within us, sealed in the subconscious cellars of the psyche.
- Eric Hoffer

In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity -or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity- by being opinionated rather than by being learned.
- A. N. Wilson

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, showers its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.
- Andrew Jackson

The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.
- Oscar Wilde

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike -and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two- are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
- Harold Bloom

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.
- Benjamin Haydon

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.
- Mother Teresa

Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.
- Soren Kierkegaard

The evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality.
- Arthur Koestler

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

Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss gazes into you.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

I believe that ignorance is the root of all evil. And that no one knows the truth.
- Molly Ivins

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Death? Why this fuss about death. Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! ... Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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

He who does not punish evil, commands it to be done.
- Leonardo da Vinci

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.
- Friedrich Nietzsche