49 Good And Evil Quotes

In the timeless conflict between good and evil, words have the power to inspire, provoke thought, and reveal profound truths about the human condition. Whether spoken by philosophers, penned by novelists, or depicted in films, certain quotes resonate deeply, capturing the essence of morality, heroism, and the shadowy nuances of the human soul. In this post, we've gathered a curated collection of the top 49 quotes on good and evil, each one offering a unique perspective on this eternal struggle. Join us as we delve into these reflections that challenge our perceptions and enlighten our paths.

1. “You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.” - Jim Butcher

2. “Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.” - Ian Fleming

3. “A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.” - George Bernard Shaw

4. “Within the infant rind of this small flowerPoison hath residence and medicine power.For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.Two such opposèd kings encamp them still,In man as well as herbs—grace and rude will. And where the worser is predominant,Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.(Inside the little rind of this weak flower, there is both poison and powerful medicine. If you smell it, you feel good all over your body. But if you taste it, you die. There are two opposite elements in everything, in men as well as in herbs—good and evil. When evil is dominant, death soon kills the body like cancer.) ” - William Shakespeare

5. “Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

6. “I hope you haven't given up on the S.Q.'s of the world, Reynie. As you see, there are a great many sheep in wolves' clothing. If not for S.Q.'s good nature, we'd never have escaped.” - Trenton Lee Stewart

7. “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

8. “I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good," the Golux said, "by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life.""The firefly's ?" said the minstrel."The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.” - James Thurber

9. “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.'Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled 'theologians', whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as “karmic reassignment”) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: 'In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)'I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of Harlot's Ghost and The Armies of the Night.” - Christopher Hitchens

10. “People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.” - Terry Pratchett

11. “Men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God” - John Irving

12. “The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?” - Wilkie Collins

13. “I'm half good and I'm half bad. My mama is a very good girl and my daddy is a very bad boy. And I guess that leaves me somewhere sort of...here.” - C. JoyBell C.

14. “I thought, gazing at the beauty of the landscape again, it is as though the fiend has prevailed against the angels, and fixed his throne in a heaven, to rule it as though it were Hell.” - Tom Holland

15. “Cruelty and wrong are not the greatest forces in the world. There is nothing eternal in them. Only love is eternal.” - Elisabeth Elliot

16. “The fact is that we have no way of knowing if the person who we think we are is at the core of our being. Are you a decent girl with the potential to someday become an evil monster, or are you an evil monster that thinks it's a decent girl?""Wouldn't I know which one I was?""Good God, no. The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.” - Derek Landy

17. “Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.” - CHOGYAM TRUNGPA

18. “We run to place and power over the dead bodies of those who fail and fall; ay, we win the food we eat from out the mouths of starving babes.” - H. Rider Haggard

19. “Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?” - H. Rider Haggard

20. “All right I think we've been down here in the dark long enough. There's a whole other world upstairs. Take my hand, Constant Reader, and I'll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine. I'm happy to go there because I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.” - Stephen King

21. “Evil forges a tornado.But goodness battles in a straight line.” - Caris Roane

22. “Tell me,' asked Stas, 'what is a wicked deed?' 'If anyone takes away Kali's cow,' he answered after a brief reflection, 'that then is a wicked deed.' 'Excellent!' exclaimed Stas, 'and what is a good one?' This time the answer came without any reflection: 'If Kali takes away the cow of somebody else, that is a good deed.' Stas was too young to perceive that similar views of evil and good deeds were enunciated in Europe not only by politicians but by whole nations.” - Henryk Sienkiewicz

23. “Maybe it’s not as clear-cut as that. Maybe it’s the very presence of one thing – light or darkness – that necessitates the existence of the other.Think about it, people couldn’t become legendary heroes if they hadn’t first done something to combat darkness. Doctors could do no good if thereweren’t diseases for them to treat.” - Jessica Shirvington

24. “Sometimes, the wicked will tell us things just to confuse us–to haunt our thoughts long after we've faced them.” - Sarah J. Maas

25. “Deep inside, the majority of people had the sneaking suspicion that evil was more powerful than good and could be counteracted only by more evil.” - Randall Garrett

26. “It is well, I think, for us to learn to tell evil from good; but it has its price, as everything does. We leave our evil friend behind.” - Gene Wolfe

27. “Good and Evil are opposite points on a circle, Dr. Chiver. Greater good is just halfway back to Bad.” - Sheri Holman

28. “Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that's who. (...)You saw how close men lived to the beast. You realized that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibily sane. They were simply men without a shield. They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to. They weren't fooled by all the little stories. They shook hands with the beast.” - Terry Pratchett

29. “People always equate beauty with good, but it just ain't so.” - Jim Butcher

30. “No one just starts giggling and wearing black and signs up to become a villainous monster. How the hell do you think it happens? It happens to people. Just people. They make questionable choices, for what might be very good reasons. They make choice after choice, and none of them is slaughtering roomfuls of saints, or murdering hundreds of baby seals, or rubber-room irrational. But it adds up. And then one day they look around and realized that they're so far over the line that they can't remember where it was.” - Jim Butcher

31. “I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.” - Terry Pratchett

32. “Wenn man einmal das Böse bei sich aufgenommen hat, verlangt es nicht mehr, daß man ihm glaube.” - Franz Kafka

33. “When the prophet, a complacent fat man,Arrived at the mountain-topHe cried: "Woe to my knowledge!I intended to see good white landsAnd bad black lands—But the scene is grey.” - Stephen Crane

34. “Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.” - Ernest Hemingway

35. “Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood.” - Dean Koontz

36. “There may be some truth (atheists) do not need to believe in a god to be good, but then if they do not believe in a god, who do they believe gives the Universal Law of following good and shunning evil? Obviously, mankind. But then that is a dangerous thing, for if a man does not believe in a god capable of giving perfect laws, he is in the position of declaring all laws come from man, and as man is imperfect, he can declare that as fallible men make imperfect laws, he can pick and choose what he wishes to follow, that which, in his own mind seems good. He does not believe in divine retribution, therefore he can also declare his own morality contrary to what the divine may decree simply because he believes there is no divine decree. He may follow his every whim and passion, declaring it to be good when it may be very evil, for he like all men is imperfect, so how can he tell what is verily good? The atheist is in danger of mistaking vice for good and consequently follow another slave master and tyrant, his own physical and mental weakness. Evil would be wittingly or unwittingly perpetrated, therefore, to recognise the existence of a perfect divine being that gives perfect Universal Laws is much better than not to believe in a god, for if there is a perfect god, they will not allow their laws to be broken with impunity as in the case with many corrupt judges on earth, but will punish accordingly in due time. Therefore, to be pious and reverent is the surest path to true freedom as a perfect god will give perfect laws to prevent all manner of slavery, tyranny and moral wantonness, even if we do not understand why they are good laws at times.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

37. “Good to evil seems evil.” - Ray Bradbury

38. “I want something good to die for. . . to make it beautiful to live.” - Stacey T. Hunt

39. “As for Doing-good...I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.” - Henry David Thoreau

40. “This is not going to be easy. I'm good at being bad, but I'm bad at being good. I don't know the first thing about good deeds.” - Neal Shusterman

41. “Good and bad exist always, everywhere” - R. Alan Woods

42. “And those characters [in a fairy tale] dwell in a moral world, whose laws are as clear as the law of gravity. That too is a great advantage of the folk tale. It is not a failure of imagination to see the sky blue. It is a failure rather to be weary of its being blue- and not to notice how blue it is. And appreciation of the subtler colors of the sky will come later. In the folk tale, good is good and evil is evil, and the former will triumph and later will fail. This is not the result of the imaginative quest. It is rather its principle and foundation. It is what will enable the child later on to understand Macbeth, or Don Quixote, or David Copperfield.” - Anthony Esolen

43. “You speak as if this is a good world with a little evil in it. Rubbish. It's a hellish one where the best a man can do is put a little sanity back and look after his own.” - A.J. Hartley and David Hewson

44. “The greatest power of bureaucracies is to make the smart act stupid and the good to act evil.” - Raul Ramos y Sanchez

45. “The disciples of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, tell of a dream he had. In the dream, the very incarnation of the Evil Impulse appears in the form of a sinister heart. The Baal Shem Tov seizes the heart and pounds it furiously. He would destroy evil and redeem the world. As he pummels it, he hears an infant’s sobbing emitted from the heart. He stops beating it. In the midst of evil is a voice of innocence; there is goodness entangled in evil.” - Harold Schulweis

46. “Beware when wrong-doing is called good and right-doing is called evil.” - R. Alan Woods

47. “Evil flourishes because the good aren't good enough," see murmured. "And sometimes the good just have bad days.” - K.J. Bishop

48. “It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange...How shall a man judge what to do in such times?' 'As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

49. “The image that comes to mind is a boxing ring. There are times when...you just want that bell to ring, but you're the one who's losing. The one who's winning doesn't have that feeling. Do you have the energy and strength to face life? Life can ask more of you than you are willing to give. And then you say, 'Life is not something that should have been. I'm not going to play the game. I'm going to meditate. I'm going to call "out".'There are three positions possible. One is the up-to-it, and facing the game and playing through. The second is saying, Absolutely not. I don't want to stay in this dogfight. That's the absolute out. The third position is the one that says, This is mixed of good and evil. I'm on the side of the good. I accept the world with corrections. And may [the world] be the way I like it. And it's good for me and my friends. There are only the three positions.” - Joseph Campbell