Quotes about Evil

Satan, then, is God's primary target, for he is the one who bears the primary responsibility for all that is wrong with the world.

Jesus referred to him as "a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44 NRSV). Indeed, his whole kingdom is based on lies; he works by deceiving.

Worship nevertheless imprints on our whole being the reality that we study. The effect is a radical disruption of the powers of evil in us and around us. Often an enduring and substantial change is brought about. And the renewal of worship keeps the glow and power of our true homeland an active agent in all parts of our being. To "hear and do" in the atmosphere of worship is the clearest, most obvious and natural thing imaginable.

The Christian story is a story of human redemption from sin and from the power of evil. It is a story of the power of Jesus to overcome evil without engaging in it—of how he lives beyond all that evil can do against him or us. He has to be victorious in this battle.

The minute we stop learning, we begin death, the process of dying. We learn from each other with every action we perform. We are teaching goodness or evil every time we step out of the house and into the street.

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won't fail to see a chance to meddle.

Women do have an affinity for evil, for believing that no woman is to be trusted, but that some men are too innocent to protect themselves.

I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there—that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

The submission which you demand of yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up.

The humblest individual exerts some influence, either for good or evil, upon others.

It is not enough for us to restrain from doing evil, unless we shall also do good.