Jacob > Jacob's Quotes

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Man is the cruelest animal.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.”
― Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle

“We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.”
― Douglas Preston, The Monster of Florence

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously 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?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what evil comes from judging wrongly.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.”
― David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste and Other Essays

“Animals don't behave like men,' he said. 'If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.”
― Richard Adams, Watership Down

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Son, the greatest trick the Devil pulled was convincing the world there was only one of him.”
― David Wong, John Dies at the End

“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“Don't ever call me mad, Mycroft. I'm not mad. I'm just ... well, differently moraled, that's all.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
― Robert J. Hanlon

“The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.”
― Jeff Cooper, The Art of the Rifle

“To light a candle is to cast a shadow...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“Thomas Edison's last words were "It's very beautiful over there". I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“You could rattle the stars," she whispered. "You could do anything, if only you dared. And deep down, you know it, too. That’s what scares you most.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Throne of Glass