99 Quotes On Good Vs Evil

In the timeless battle between good and evil, words have the power to inspire, challenge, and provoke thought. Throughout history, philosophers, writers, and leaders have grappled with the concepts of right and wrong, often encapsulating profound truths in memorable quotes. Whether you seek motivation for personal growth, insight into the human condition, or just a touch of inspiration to brighten your day, our curated collection of the top 99 quotes on good vs. evil offers something for everyone. These quotes are not just mere words but echoes of wisdom that continue to resonate through the ages, prompting us to reflect on the choices we make and the values we uphold.

1. “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

2. “I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.” - Charles Dickens

3. “No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the Iliad. Good and evil do not exist.” - Julian Jaynes

4. “There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.” - J.K. Rowling

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

6. “What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?” - Libba Bray

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Faustus, who embraced evil and shunned righteousness, became the foremost symbol of the misuse of free will, that sublime gift from God with its inherent opportunity to choose virtue and reject iniquity. “What shall a man gain if he has the whole world and lose his soul,” (Matt. 16: v. 26) - but for a notorious name, the ethereal shadow of a career, and a brief life of fleeting pleasure with no true peace? This was the blackest and most captivating tragedy of all, few could have remained indifferent to the growing intrigue of this individual who apparently shook hands with the devil and freely chose to descend to the molten, sulphuric chasm of Hell for all eternity for so little in exchange. It is a drama that continues to fascinate today as powerfully as when Faustus first disseminated his infamous card in the Heidelberg locale to the scandal of his generation. In fine, a life of good or evil, the hope of Heaven or the despair of Hell, Faustus stands as a reminder that the choice between these two absolutes also falls to us.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

13. “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.

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “And I reckon them that are good must suffer for it the same as them that are bad.” - William Faulkner

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

19. “For she had discovered that as well as the evil web there was another. This too bound spirits together, but not in a tangle, it was a patterned web and one could see the silver pattern when the sun shone upon it. It seemed much frailer than the dark tangle, that had a hideous strength, but it might not be so always, not in the final reckoning.” - Elizabeth Goudge

20. “To see evil and call it good, mocks God. Worse, it makes goodness meaningless. A word without meaning is an abomination, for when the word passes beyond understanding the very thing the word stands for passes out of the world and cannot be recalled.” - Stephen R. Lawhead

21. “Here dwells a snake, one thousand miles longCoiled, one thousand miles deepEyes like candy, it has eyes like candyHard and blue, but soft as kittens feetOut of sight or in the element of lightIt could be a devil, it could be an angelWith spiders inside a vision from hellIts spine is a vertical screamSlow as concrete, blurred as a dreamFueled by inertia, depth, radius, and velocity,Its soul--a twisted wreckage of despair and painAnd the spiders inside are just praying for rainKilling time killing timeAnd praying for rainOne thousand miles deep” - James O'Barr

22. “Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.” - Anthony Burgess

23. “And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.” - Joyce Carol Oates

24. “Within the universe of the extraordinary, those qualities we designate to human concepts of gender are often shared, exchanged, or even completely obliterated. Because of this mixture of traits, these twins called Genius and Madness often appear to be the same thing. They both have a tendency to blur the lines of what we call norms, or established reality. They both, when we study that grand tapestry known as history and modern-day society, tend to stand out in much bolder relief than other figures.-- from Dancing with Madness, Dancing with Genius” - Author-Poet Aberjhani

25. “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

26. “Poor God, how often He is blamed for all the suffering in theworld. It’s like praising Satan for allowing all the good that happens.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

27. “People may be persuaded that the machine is doing good. In fact, good is only capable of being done on a small scale. Evil is more versatile. You can hate those you have never seen, all the vast multitudes of them, but you can only love those you know — and that with difficulty.” - John Christopher

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

29. “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.

30. “There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.” - Neil Gaiman

31. “Man cries, his tears dry up and run out. So he becomes a devil, reduced to a monster.” - Kouta Hirano

32. “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

33. “There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

34. “And one of the elders of the city, said, speak to us of good and evil.And he answered:You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good.” - Khalil Gibran

35. “Sully disapproved of destruction for destruction's sake, which seemed ever more popular in the modern world, but he always took delight in burning out or otherwise eliminating Evil when Evil just couldn't keep its ugly head down and stay in the shadows, when it came right at you with all teeth bared. The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn't let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.” - Dean Koontz

36. “The fact that you are possessed by a demon does not mean you must become evil. Being evil is a choice, just as being good is a choice. If you let the demon take over, it's because you choose to.” - James Swain

37. “All my life, I've understood the nature of where I come from, but I never thought it might be wicked until now.” - Brenna Yovanoff

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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “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

43. “You think that your laws correct evil - they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil - by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.” - Leo Tolstoy

44. “All the things of the wild have their proper uses. Only misuse makes them evil.” - Ellis Peters

45. “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

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

47. “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

48. “[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

49. “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

50. “I have one head that wants to be good,And one that wants to be bad.And always, as soon as I get up,One of my heads is sad.” - John Ciardi

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

52. “... true evil needs no reason to exist, it simply is and feeds upon itself.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

53. “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

54. “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

55. “We move in and out of darkness and light all our lives. Right now I'm pleased to be in the light.” - Neal Shusterman

56. “She looked at her shelves, filled with books in which the bad stuff that happened to people was caused by things like witches who lured people into the woods. In a weird way, the world seemed to make more sense that way.” - Anne Ursu

57. “If you boil it down, just because someone else does the wrong thing we are not exempt from doing what’s right.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

58. “Vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful.” - Benjamin Franklin

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

60. “The devil has not vanished simply because people refuse to believe he exists, no more than God has...” - E.A. Bucchianeri

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

62. “And I must believe that man has the power to know the right, to choose between good and evil and know that his choice has made a difference...” - Marion Zimmer Bradley

63. “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

64. “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

65. “Das Negative zu tun, ist uns noch auferlegt, das Positive ist uns schon gegeben.” - Franz Kafka

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

67. “With Stefan, the line between good and evil, right and wrong, becomes increasingly blurred.” - Melika Dannese Lux

68. “War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

69. “You see we do, yet see you but our handsAnd this the bleeding business they have done:Our hearts you see not; they are pitiful” - William Shakespeare

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky

74. “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

75. “Those who won't accept evil never get anything good.” - August Strindberg

76. “I was modest--they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil--nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate.” - Mikhail Lermontov

77. “Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.” - C. S. Lewis

78. “Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.” - William Faulkner

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

80. “Perante o seu momentâneo desânimo, a mãe encheu uma panela com água e deu-lhe nove ocos. Disse: «Põe os ovos, um a um, dentro de água, com cuidado para não se partirem. Os que forem ao fundo, estão bons, os que vierem acima, estão estragados.Duarte perguntou se não deveria ser ao contrário: os maus irem ao fundo e os bons nadarem.A mãe riu-se: «Não, os bons vão ao fundo.»” - João Ricardo Pedro

81. “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

82. “Since man always remains free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitively established in this world. Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last forever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must be constantly won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined and good state of the world, man's freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all.” - Pope Benedict-XVI

83. “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

84. “Good' did not triumph. 'Evil' did not triumph. The two resolved, destroyed each other and created new 'evils', new 'goods' which slew each other in their turn.” - Eric Ambler

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

86. “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

87. “Evil might not prevail in the end, but it certainly doesn't fail to devastate in its time.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

88. “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

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

90. “It's going to be like an...aura, I guess."He looked down at me and raised an eyebrow. "Explain?""Like even though there are outside forces pushing through the walls, in here it's like a bubble of goodness. Like coming home."I could feel him smiling and it encouraged me to elaborate. "When I think of how others would see it, I imagine them seeing a force of goodness overshadowing a force of evil, protecting it.” - Jessica Shirvington

91. “So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom...” - Ursula K. Le Guin

92. “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

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

94. “Deep down, she's a good person, Diana is," Caine said, and sighed. "Deep down, I'm not. But she is.” - Michael Grant

95. “There is more goodness than evil in the world, but you know, you still got to work at it.” - Lasky Kathryn

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

97. “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

98. “I want to dance always, to be good and not evil, and when it is all over not to have the feeling that I might have done better.” - Ruth St. Denis

99. “পাচটি জিনিস খুব খারাপ১) আলেমের খারাপ কাজ২) শাসকের লালসাবৃত্তি৩) বৃদ্ধের জেনাকারিতা৪) ধনীর কৃপণতা৫) নারীর নির্লজ্জতা” - হযরত আলী রাঃ