Famous Quotes & Sayings

Honore de Balzac

Let us leave the cure of public evils to those quacks, the statesmen.

Honore de Balzac

Like evil, sublimity is also contagious.

James Boswell

Those who would extirpate evil from the world know little of human nature. As well might punch be palatable without souring as existence agreeable without care.

J. R. R. Tolkien

There are many powers in the world, for good or for evil. Some are greater than I am. Against some I have not yet been measured. But my time is coming.

J. R. R. Tolkien

For so sworn good or evil an oath may not be broken and it shall pursue oathkeeper and oathbreaker to the world's end.

J. R. R. Tolkien

For nothing is evil in the beginning.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You are not a fool. They are the fools. For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself.

Isaac Asimov

All evil is good become cancerous.

Iris Chang

Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.

Immanuel Kant

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

Pat Benatar

Before I put another notch in my lipstick case, you better make sure you put me in my place.

Joseph Stalin

Mr. Churchill, Mr. Prime Minister, how many divisions did you say that the pope had?

Joseph Brodsky

After having exhausted all the arguments on behalf of evil, one utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor.

Joseph Brodsky

Russian talk of political evil is as natural as eating ...

Leonardo da Vinci

It is easier to contend with evil at the first than at the last.

Leonardo da Vinci

Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age; and if you understand that old age has wisdom for its food, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.

Leonardo da Vinci

He who does not oppose evil......commands it to be done.

Leonardo da Vinci

Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.

Oscar Wilde

We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

Patrick Rothfuss

It's one thing to not want an evil-sorcerer type villain in your story, but it's another thing to avoid having any sort of antagonist at all. A story without an antagonist gets weird pretty quick.

Leon Trotsky

Our planet is being turned into a filthy and evil-smelling imperialist barrack.

Nazr Mohammed

To overcome evil with good is good, to resist evil with evil is evil.

Natan Sharansky

When we are unwilling to draw clear moral lines between free societies and fear societies, when we are unwilling to call the former good and the latter evil, we will not be able to advance the cause of peace because peace cannot be disconnected from freedom.

Muhammad Ali

My definition of evil is unfriendliness

Mikhail Lermontov

Evil spawns evil. The first experience of torture gives an understanding of the pleasure in tormenting others.

Mikhail Bulgakov

You pronounced your words as if you don’t acknowledge the shadows, or the evil either. Would you be so kind as to give a little thought to the question of what your good would be doing if evil did not exist, and how the earth would look if the shadows were to disappear from it?

Mikhail Bulgakov

What would your good do if evil didn't exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The existence of poverty in the US should not be accepted as a necessary evil or insoluble problem, but should be considered a crisis requiring emergency measures. It is a matter of will and priorities, not a matter of resources.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

My uncertainty disappeared. Segregation is evil, and I cannot, as a minister, condone evil.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

[Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.

Mark Bittman

The current health crisis, however, is a little more the work of the evil empire. We were told, we were assured, that the more meat and dairy and poultry we ate, the healthier we'd be

Mikhail Bakunin

Human nature is so constituted that the propensity for evil is always intensified by external circumstances, and the morality of the individual depends much more on the conditions of his existence and the environment in which he lives than on his own will.