Quotes : Evil
"If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever."
(Woody Allen / born in 1935 / Love and Death, 1975)
"Evil: That which one believes of others. It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake"
(Henry Louis Mencken / 1880-1956)
"Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than action; innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) "thou shalt not" predominates unduly over "thou shalt."
(John Stuart Mill / 1806-1873 / On Liberty / 1859)
"The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly, has made the world evil and ugly."
(Friedrich Nietzsche / 1844-1900)
"Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man."
(Friedrich Nietzsche / 1844-1900)
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
(Blaise Pascal/ 1623-1662)
"It is odd that neither the Church nor modern public opinion condemns petting, provided it stops short at a certain point. At what point sin begins is a matter as to which casuists differ. One eminently orthodox Catholic divine laid it down that a confessor may fondle a nun's breasts, provided he does it without evil intent. But I doubt whether modern authorities would agree with him on this point."
(Bertrand Russell / 1872-1970)
"It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as
death, should ever have been devised by Providence as an evil to mankind."
(Jonathan Swift / 1667-1745)
"A little evil is often necessary for obtaining a great good."
(Voltaire / 1694-1778)
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion."
(Steven Weinberg / born un 1933 / Nobel Laureate in physics)