Evil Quotes, Quotations & Sayings

Of two evils we must always choose the least.
Thomas a Kempis

A good friend who points out mistakes and imperfections and rebukes evil is to be respected as if he reveals a secret of hidden treasure.
Buddha

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Edmund Burke

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.
Buddha

We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.
Hierocles

The urge to gamble is so universal and its practice so pleasurable that I assume it must be evil.
Heywood Hale Broun

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
Voltaire

Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.
Bible

There is hardly a man clever enough to recognize the full extent of the evil he does.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.
Seneca

Evil is whatever distracts.
Franz Kafka

I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents…. The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
John Steinbeck

I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest.
Alexandre Dumas

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.
Gloria Steinem

The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn’t angry enough.
Bede Jarrett

For he that does good, having the unlimited power to do evil, deserves praise not only for the good which he performs, but for the evil which he forbears.
Sir Walter Scott

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
Hannah Arendt

Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men?
Bible

Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance.
John Henry Newman

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Edmund Burke

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
Bible

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

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
William Shakespeare

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.
Seneca

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even-if you will-eccentricity. That is, something that can’t be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn’t be happy with.
Joseph Brodsky

I know indeed what evil I intend to do,
but stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury,
fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.
Euripides

Oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths;
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence.
William Shakespeare

There is an old illusion-it is called good and evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
W. H. Auden