It is the melancholy law of human societies to be compelled sometimes to choose a great evil in order to ward off a greater evil. Lyndon Baines Johnson
Of the two evils the lesser is always to be chosen. Thomas a Kempis
Little evil would be done in the world if evil never could be done in the name of good. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
There is scarcely a single man sufficiently aware to know all the evil he does. Duc de la Rochefoucauld, Maximes, 1678
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those who do evil is done
Do evil in return. W H Auden, 1st September 1939
Evil is unspectacular and always human
And shares our bed and eats at our own table. W H Auden, Herman Melville
It is quite awful to watch the strength of evil in such young minds, and how powerless is every effort against it. Thomas Arnold, 1795-1842, English historian & educator
Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
It is much easier at all times to prevent an evil than to rectify mistakes. George Washington, letter to James McHenry 10th August 1798
Don’t let us make imaginary evils when you know we have so many real ones to encounter. Oliver Goldsmith, The Good-Natured Man
It’s always held up as something which is completely alien, completely other and integral to this person. This person is simply explained away as another species from the rest of us. Julian Baggini, editor-in-chief The Philosophers’ Magazine
As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy. Christopher Dawson, The Judgement of the Nations, 1942
For we do not easily expect evil of those whom we love most. Peter Abelard, 1079-1142, French scholar & theologian & philosopher
He who is in evil, is also in the punishment of evil. Emanuel Swedenborg
The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil. F H Bradley, English philosopher
Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst. F H Bradley
I’ve got evil in me as much as anyone, some desires that scare me. Even if I don’t give in to them, just having them scares the living bejesus out of me sometimes. I’m no saint, the way you kid about. But I’ve always walked the line, walked that goddamned line. It’s a mean mother of a line, straight and narrow, sharp as a razor, cuts right into you when you walk it long enough. You’re always bleeding on that line, and sometimes you wonder why you don’t just step off and walk in the cool grass. Dean Koontz, Dark Rivers of the Heart
As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can’t eat, and home the very place you can’t live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played. C S Lewis, Perelandra
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern. C S Lewis, The Screwtape Letters preface
My book is a plea to set aside the term evil because I don’t think it’s scientific. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, interview Andrew Marr Radio 4 2nd May 2011
It’s just another word for bad ... It’s probably circular – he did something bad because he is bad ... The term empathy can lead to predictions. ibid.
I think it has a performative quality ... Evil is much more about trying to describe the state of mind we are in. Gwen Adshead, Broadmoor forensic psychotherapist, interview Andrew Marr Radio 4 2nd May 2011
Attachment Theory has transformed psychiatry and psychotherapy. ibid.
I don’t think the word is useful ... That is a way of letting society off the hook. Val McDermid, crime writer, interview Andrew Marr Radio 4 2nd May 2011
Never open the door to the least of evils, for many other greater ones lurk outside. Baltasar Gracian, Spanish philosopher
Nature in her indifference makes no distinction between good and evil. Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels
I want none of your faint approval or faint dispraise. To hell with Christianity, rationalism, Buddhism. I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution. Anything bad or good. But strong. Aleister Crowley
I have exposed myself to every form of disease, accident and violence. I have driven myself to delight in dirty and disgusting debauches, and to devour human excrements and human flesh. I have mastered every mode of my mind, and made myself a morality more severe than any other in the world. A thousand years from now the world will be sitting in the sunset of Crowlianity. Aleister Crowley
All concerns of men go wrong when they wish to cure evil with evil. Sophocles, The Sons of Aleus
The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter. Sophocles, Philoctetes
What we call evil, it seems to me, is simply ignorance bumping its head in the dark. Henry Ford, Theosophist magazine February 1930
Between two evils I always like to take the one I’ve never tried before. Mae West, Klondike Annie
All human beings ... are commingled out of good and evil. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are. Robert Louis Stevenson
The face of evil is always the face of total need. William S Burroughs, The Naked Lunch introduction
Past and present religious atrocities have occurred not because we are evil but because it is a fact of Nature that the human species is biologically only partly rational. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great
The evil he did will live after him. Christopher Hitchens, interview Hannity and Colmes re Reverend Falwell’s Death
It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book On God] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. ‘How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.’