Good And Evil Quotes - Page 23

• To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions-between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, cooperativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation.

  Norman Cousins

  Men, Essence, Optimism

  Norman Cousins (1953). “Who Speaks for Man?”, New York : Macmillan

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• In sum, all actions and habits are to be esteemed good or evil by their causes and usefulness in reference to the commonwealth, and not by their mediocrity, nor by their being commended. For several men praise several customs, and, contrarily, what one calls vice, another calls virtue, as their present affections lead them.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Men, Evil, Vices

  Thomas Hobbes (2014). “Behemoth or The Long Parliament”, p.45, University of Chicago Press

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• Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man's yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!

  Flora Tristan

  Men, Rights, Law

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• As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.

  Jostein Gaarder

  Philosophy, Home, Years

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• Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.

  Keith Haring

  Opposites, Evil, Facts

  Keith Haring (2010). “Keith Haring Journals: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.132, Penguin

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• [I]t was with a good end in mind – that of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil – that Eve allowed herself to be carried away and eat the forbidden fruit. But Adam was not moved by this desire for knowledge, but simply by greed: he ate it because he heard Eve say it tasted good.

  Moderata Fonte

  Evil, Greed, Mind

  Moderata (Modesta Pozzo) Fonte (2007). “The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men”, p.94, University of Chicago Press

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• We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and rational faculties that make us both just and wise. We simplify the complexity of human experience by erecting a seemingly impermeable boundary between Good and Evil.

  Philip Zimbardo

  Wise, Believe, People

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• Good and evil are merely opposite sides of a coin. Get tossed in the air enough, it's easy to come down on the wrong side.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Air, Opposites, Evil

  Karen Marie Moning (2016). “The Fever Series 7-Book Bundle: Darkfever, Bloodfever, Faefever, Dreamfever, Shadowfever, Iced, Burned”, p.797, Dell

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• This is the crux of the moral pessimists: if they really wanted to promote their neighbor's redemption, then they would have to resolve themselves to spoiling existence for him, and thus to being his misfortune; out of pity, they would have to--become evil!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Evil, Redemption, Morality

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• Everything good is the transmutation of something evil: every god has a devil for a father.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  God, Father, Evil

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• There's always the question of what is good and evil and the gray area in between where that most people live. In everyday life, things aren't black or white, but rather there's a lot of coping and really tough decision making.

  Laura San Giacomo

  White, People, Evil

  Source: movieweb.com

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• Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols -- it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.

  William Hazlitt

  Race, Idols, Evil

  William Hazlitt (1871). “The Round Table. A collection of Essays ... By W. H. and Leigh Hunt”, p.553

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• While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Evil, World, Patterns

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• I am perhaps a late follower of Zoroaster and I believe that the foundation of life is built upon the struggle between the two opposing forces of Good and Evil.

  Eugenio Montale

  Believe, Struggle, Two

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• A belief, however necessary it may be for the preservation of a species, has nothing to do with truth. The falseness of a judgment is not for us necessarily an objection to a judgment. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species preserving, perhaps even species cultivating. To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophy, Mean, Evil

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• I believe you can make forces of good and evil work for you, to get what you want.

  GG Allin

  Believe, Evil, Want

  "GG Allin, The First Amendment, And The Law". Interview with Joe Coughlin, www.grayarea.com. December 1992.

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• Willing or preferring is the same with respect to good and evil, that judging is with respect to truth or falsehood.

  Anthony Collins

  Evil, Judging, Willing

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• I have learned a lot about good and evil - they are not always what they appear to be.

  Charles Van Doren

  Evil, I've Learned, Quiz Show

  "Fictional character: Charles Van Doren". "Quiz Show", 1994.

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• When I sit down to write a novel, I am exploring my own relationship with God, with the struggle between good and evil, my own purpose.

  Ted Dekker

  Struggle, Writing, Evil

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• Every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from good and evil.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Power, Evil, Degrees

  Friedrich Nietzsche “Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche”, Delphi Classics

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• The apprehension of the good Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.

  William Shakespeare

  Evil, Giving, Feelings

  'Richard II' (1595) act 1, sc. 3, l. 294

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• Forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. Freedom is pitted against slavery; lightness against the dark... In the final choice, a soldier's pack is not so heavy a burden as a prisoner's chains.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  War, Dark, Evil

  1953 Inaugural address, 20 Jan.

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• You're fighting a battle of good and evil with your dog pimp! Your only weapon is the shimmy! There is power in the shimmy! Make him fear your shimmy! Now, goddamnit, show me your war shimmy!

  Laurie Notaro

  Dog, War, Fighting

  Laurie Notaro (2007). “There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Trouble”, p.253, Villard

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• All around the world, people believe that there is a great conflict between good and evil. Well, it's true that there's a conflict, but it only exists in the human mind.

  Miguel Angel Ruiz

  Spiritual, Believe, People

  AMBER-ALLEN PUBLISHING Interview, www.amberallen.com. June 4, 2013.

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• There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Military, Differences, Evil

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2014). “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien”, p.93, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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