Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Evil
- "The lust for power is not rooted in strength but in
weakness... When the weak want to give an impression of strength they hint menacingly at
their capacity for evil. It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often
attracts the weak."
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind
- Rollo May, Power and Innocence, 1972: "Deeds of
violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their
self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are
significant... Violence arises not out of superfluity of power, but out of
powerlessness."
- Dorothe Deluzy: "We believe at once in
evil, we only believe in good upon reflection. Is this not sad?"
- Augustine, The Confessions: "From whence is evil?
... as yet I knew not that evil was nothing but a privation of good,
until at last a thing ceases altogether to be."
- Blaise Pascal (1670): "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully
as when they do it from religious conviction."
- Albert Einstein: "The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men.
It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man."
- Robert J. Little: "A seared conscience is one whose warning voice has
been suppressed and perverted habitually, so that eventually instead of serving as a
guide, it only confirms the person in his premeditatedly evil course."
Saturn Devouring His Son
by Francisco Goya
- Joyce Cary: "For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This
produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore
continuous change and insecurity."
- Blaise Pascal: "I have discovered that all human evil comes from
this, man's being unable to sit still and quiet in a room alone."
- J. C. Hare: "A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking
in his neighbor for what he sees in himself. As to the pure all things are pure, even so
to the impure all things are impure."
- Joseph Conrad: "The belief in a supernatural source of evil
is not necessary, men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
- Junius: "The lives of the best of us are spent in choosing between
evils."
- Buddha: "All that we are is the result of what we have
thought… If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him… If a
man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never
leaves him."
- Francois De La Rochefoucauld: "There is hardly a man clever
enough to recognize the full extent of the evil he does."
- James Fenimore Cooper: "It is a governing principle of
nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim,
is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to
watch the tendency of even their most highly prized institutions, since that which was
established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the
wrong."
- Aldous Huxley: "The effects which follow too constant and
intense a concentration upon evil are always disastrous. Those who crusade, not for God in
themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but
leave it either as it was, or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was, before the
crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to
create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
- Henry David Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking at the
branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."
- President Ronald Reagan, speech to the National Association of Evangelicals,
March 8, 1983: "Let us beware that while they [Soviet rulers] preach the
supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its
eventual domination over all the peoples of the earth, they are the focus of evil in the
modern world.... I urge you to beware the temptation ... to ignore the facts of history
and the aggressive impulses of any evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant
misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong,
good and evil."
- Adolf Hitler: "The great strength of a totalitarian state
is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it... I am liberating man from the
degrading chimera known as 'conscience'... Success is the sole earthly judge of right and
wrong... The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."
- Niccolo Machiavelli: "... the end justifies
the means."
- Martin Niemoeller: "In Germany they came
first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they
came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the
trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came
for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for
me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."
- Thomas Reed: "One of the greatest delusions in the world is
the hope that the evils of this world are to be cured by legislation."
- C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters: "The greatest evil
is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint … but is
conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed,
well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and
smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices."
- Martin Luther King, Stride Toward Freedom: "He who
passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who
accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: "If
only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil
deeds, and it were necessary only 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?"
- Mohandas Gandhi, Non-Violence in Peace and War: "...
we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up."
- Whatever weakens your reason,
impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, takes off your
relish for spiritual things, whatever increases the authority of the body over the mind,
that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may seem in itself.
Susana Wesley (mother
of John Wesley)
- Thomas Hardy: "A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom
framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible."
- Charles W. Chestnutt: "Those that set in motion the forces
of evil cannot always control them afterwards."
- Mohammed: "To overcome evil with good is good, to resist
evil by evil is evil."
- C.S. Lewis: Why Does Evil Exist? "It was of no interest to
God to create a species consisting of virtuous automata, for the 'virtue' of automata who
can do no other than they do is a courtesy title only; it is analogous to the 'virtue' of
the stone that rolls downhill or of the water that freezes at 32 degrees. To what end, it
may be asked, should God create such creatures? That He might be praised by them? But
automatic praise is a mere succession of noises. That He might love them? But they are
essentially unloveable; you cannot love puppets. And so God gave man free will that he
might increase in virtue by his own efforts and become, a free moral being, a worthy
object of God's love. Freedom entails freedom to go wrong: man did, in fact, go wrong,
misusing God's gift and doing evil. Pain is a by-product of evil; and so pain came into
the world as a result of man's misuse of God's gift of free will."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "There is nothing quite so terrible as evil masquerading as
virtue."
- Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, The Christian Agnostic:
"I would distinguish between evil and sin.... It seems to me to make for clearer
thinking if we keep the word 'sin' to describe a conscious, responsible act of the will,
by which, recognizing the existence of a moral choice, one chooses wrong, knowing it to be
wrong, because, for the moment, at any rate, it is desired more than its alternative.
Clearly, if that definition be accepted, 'many men,' as Lord Russell once wrote, 'who do
not believe in God nevertheless have a sense of sin,' though the Christian has a more
acute sense, since he perceives that his sin hurts and hinders a loving God whom he is
pledged to serve. 'Sin,' said St. Augustine, 'is so much voluntary evil that it is not sin
at all unless it is voluntary.' 'Sins' said Dr. Hadfield, the famous Harley Street
psychiatrist, 'result from a deliberate and conscious choice of the self and depend upon
the acceptance of a low ideal.'"
- September 12, 2001, The Day After, news item: "While rescue
workers tried desperately to pull survivors from the wreckage, President Bush committed
the country to a monumental struggle of good versus evil."
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick: Ahab, after convincing his
crew to pursue the white whale: "'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one
stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and
they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me;
and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What
I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad -- Starbuck
does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to
comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I would be dismembered; and -- Aye! I
lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer."
- David Westin, October 23, 2001: ABC News President David Westin
caused a stir at Columbia University when he was asked whether he thought the Pentagon was
a legitimate military target. Westin replied, "I actually don't have an
opinion on that, and it's important I not have an opinion on that as I sit here in my
capacity right now. As a journalist, I feel strongly that's something that I
should not be taking a position on." [Westin later apologized for the remarks,
saying, "I was wrong. Under any interpretation, the attack on the Pentagon was
criminal and entirely without justification. I apologize for any harm that my misstatement
may have caused." Tony Snow: "Westin responded not once, but twice, that he
could not render a verdict on the Pentagon as a target. Now, that was just plain dumb.
Reporters have to make judgments with every story they cover, beginning with the choice of
which fact is the most important and which sources matter. Only an imbecile would turn off
his moral filters in order to cover breaking news -- especially stories that involve mass
murder. Westin wants passionless automatons. While I'm happy to let such contraptions wash
my car, I don't want them bringing me news"; Wesley Pruden: "Of course, David
Westin is not a journalist at all. He never has been, not even a television journalist,
and as anyone at ABC News could tell you, he wouldn't know how to get off his
ample capacity to cover a grass fire. He's a lawyer, not a journalist, which is a
very different kind of public enemy. He probably thinks this is the way celebrity
journalists are supposed to talk, remembering how Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace, on a
similar occasion a decade ago, insisted that if they were accompanying enemy soldiers and
learned of an imminent attack on American positions they wouldn't warn the Americans even
if they could. The code of journalists is a strict one."]
- Desmahis: "We cannot do evil to others without doing it to
ourselves."
- Emerson: "Every evil to which we do not succumb is a
benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemmy he
kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist."
- Southey: "As sure as God is good, so surely there is no
such thing as necessary evil."
- Chapin: "In the history of man it has been very generally
the case that when evils have grown insufferable they have touched the point of
cure."
- Channing: "Even in evil, that dark cloud which hands over
the creation, we discern rays of light and hope, and gradually come to see, in suffering
and temptation, proofs and instruments of the sublimest purposes of wisdom and love."
- Adlai E. Stevenson: "Those who currupt the public mind are
just as evil as those who steal from the public purse."
- W. H. Auden: "Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot
imagine Good."
- Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of
evil is for good men to do nothing."
- Francois De La Rochefoucauld: "We often do good in order
that we may do evil with impunity."
- Henry David Thoreau: "He who accepts evil without
protesting against it is really cooperating with it."
- Buddha: "It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that
lures him to evil ways."
- "From whence is evil? ... as yet I knew not that evil
was nothing but a privation of good... it [is] not any substance ... but the perversion of
the will, turned aside from Thee, O God."
-
Augustine, The Confessions
- Mark Twain: "Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which
he never shows to anybody."
- John 3:19-21, NIV: "This is the verdict: Light has
come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds
were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not
come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the
truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been
done through God."
- Leo Rosten: "I learned that it is the weak who are cruel,
and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong."
- St. Augustine, The Confessions: "That evil then,
which I sought whence it is, is not any substance... but the perversion of the will,
turned aside from Thee, O God."
- Dick Morris, March 13, 2002: "In Europe, it's not cool to
get hot and bothered about [9-11]. It violates the cafe-sophistication which
insists, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, on seeing a world with all shades of gray, rather
than one polarized by good and evil. Ennui is in. Energetic, righteous
indignation is for the immature. You know, like Americans."
- Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond: "The power of evil may
here and there get the upper hand: although it must ultimately lead to suicidal
destructive failure, for evil is pregnant with calamity."
- Saddam Hussein, 11-7-02, on the impending and threatening U.N. vote:
Reuters: "In Baghdad, Saddam urged the world to take a 'just' position
to stop the United States and Britain from achieving their 'evil' schemes
in the resolution on arms inspections. He said Washington and London were 'exerting
pressure on the Security Council to take resolutions that contradict international law and
the United Nations Charter. If these two American and British administrations are
able to achieve their wishes, the world would return to a new law, which is the law
of evil based on power and opportunity rather than the law of love and
justice."
- Don Feder: "The Lord
of The Rings (books and movies), and especially The Return of the King, is about the
struggle of good and evil – a dark lord of supernatural malevolence intent
on crushing free will and enslaving humanity, a ring of power which corrupts those who
possess it and therefore must be destroyed, courageous warriors, a wise and benevolent
wizard, and ordinary folk who – through their sacrifices – rise to heroic
heights. It’s a morality tale especially suited to our times. Like the inhabitants of
Middle Earth, we too confront a spreading shadow ('One ring to bring them all and in the
darkness bind them, in the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.') Our Shadow isn’t
the Dark Lord Sauron, but an equally demonic force variously designated terrorism,
fanaticism or Islamicism. It is anti-Western, anti-human rights and (ultimately)
anti-humanity. The struggle against this Dark Lord has also shown us unparalleled heroism
by ordinary people – firefighters and police, soldiers and citizens. (One thinks of
the noble Todd Beamer of 'Let’s roll' fame.) ... Tolkien believed that the only way
to combat this slide to technological barbarism is for people to rediscover their essence
– to know that each of us has a divine spark within, to understand that history
isn’t shaped by relentless forces but is the product of individuals with a vision
(angelic or demonic), and that we are not "mere cogs in the vast machine of modern
industrial society" but sub-creators, whose works can reflect the glory of the
ultimate Creator. As the wizard Gandalf proclaims when he confronts the monstrous Balrog
in Moria: I am a servant of the Secret Fire!"
- Thomas Reed, Speaker of the House, 1886: "One of the
greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured
by legislation."
- Charles Dickens: "There are
some men, who, living with the one object of enriching themselves, no matter by what
means, and being perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they
will use every day towards this end, affect nevertheless -- even to themselves -- a high
tone of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of the
world."
- John Muir: "Most people are on the world,
not in it -- have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them --
undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching, but
separate."
- Charles Spurgeon: "Beware of no one more than of yourself;
we carry our worst enemies within us."
- George Steiner: "We know that a man can read Goethe or
Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach or Schubert and go to his day's work at
Auschwitz in the morning."
-
- "I believe that unarmed truth
and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily
defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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