Definition Of Evil Quotes & Sayings

Evans-Pritchard's confession reveals the way the power advantage of the subject whose definition of a situation prevails in the larger social context (in this case the majority of the Azande) shapes the environment and behavioral constraints that impact the subject who, although does not define the situation the same way, has to behave according to the former subject's definition in order to obtain the needed resources (in this case Evans-Pritchard, who is interested in gaining knowledge of the social organization of the Azande). For Evans-Pritchard, while living among the Azande, the actual world is as if there were magical forces around, true oracles and evil witches, as his whole daily life is structured around those nonexistent entities. — Istvan Aranyosi

Anything that inhibits, impedes, or prevents this movement toward the Ultimate Complexity is evil. The wonderful thing about this definition of good and evil is that it is both objective and universally acceptable. — Gregory David Roberts

Somewhere down the line, the evil ones stole the legacy of hip hop and flipped it to a corporate type of hip hop. They decided to tell everybody 'Well, this is what hip hop is,' instead of coming back to the pioneers and getting the true definition of what hip hop is and what it was and what we been pushing for all these years. — Afrika Bambaataa

My definition of forgiveness is a sigh, very like a sigh of relief, on which the memory of evil is breathed out.
With letting go of the memory, discontinuing the incessant replaying of pain, and instead feeling the unmitigated overness of the evil, the evildoer often looks quite different: flawed, like me, a child of God, like me. Forgiven, like me. — Nevada Barr

At the moment, most of our ways of defining the unit of morality are similar in their intentions, but they differ in their details. So the priests of one nation bless their soldiers as they march to war, and the imams of another country bless their soldiers as they march out to meet them. And everybody who is involved in the killing, says that he has God on his side. There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil. And until we have one, we will go on justifying our own actions, while condemning the actions of the others.' 'And you're putting the physics of the universe up as a kind of platinum-iridium bar? — Gregory David Roberts

That's a heavy word, but picking up a newspaper every day, how can you not despair at what's happening in the world, and how we're represented as human beings? The disappointments and corruption are dismaying at every level. And the biggest source of evil is of course religion. Religions are tearing each other apart in the name of their personal god. And the irony is, by definition, they're probably worshipping the same god. — Ridley Scott

Let us concede at the outset that, in a free society, freedom will frequently be used badly. Freedom, by definition, includes freedom to do good or evil, to act nobly or basely. Thus we should not be surprised that there is a considerable amount of vice, licentiousness, and vulgarity in a free society. Given the warped timber of humanity, freedom is simply an expression of human flaws and weaknesses. But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best. — Dinesh D'Souza

That's the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can't stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. — Charlie Jane Anders

But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn't be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil. — Robin Sloan

You see, evil alwys contains the seeds of its own destruction' said the angel said, 'It is ultimately negative, and therefore encompasses its downfall even at its moment of apparent triumph. No matter how grandiose, how well-planned, how apparently foolproof an evil plan, the inherent sinfulness will by definition rebound upon its instigators. No matter how apparently successful it may seem upon the way, at the end it will wreck itself. It will founder upon the rocks of inquity and sink head first to vanish without trace into the seas of oblivion. — Terry Pratchett

The truest definition of evil is that which represents it as something contrary to nature; evil is evil because it is unnatural; a vine which should bear olive-berries, an eye to which blue seems yellow, would be diseased; an unnatural mother, an unnatural son, an unnatural act, are the strongest terms of condemnation. — Frederick William Robertson

With this definition of "evil" in mind, it is the purpose of this book to show that many laws and governmental practices are impregnated with it, and to trace this wholesale infringement of our rights to the power acquired by the federal government in 1913 to tax our incomes - the Sixteenth Amendment. That is the "root." Furthermore, proof will be offered to support the proposition that the "evil" has reached the point where the doctrine of natural rights has been all but abrogated in fact, if not in theory. As a consequence, the kind of government we are acquiring is distinctly different from that envisaged by the Founding Fathers; it is fast becoming a government that conceives itself to be the source of rights, which it gives and can recall at its own pleasure. The transformation is not yet complete, but it will be seen as we go along that completion is not far off - if nothing is done to prevent it. — Frank Chodorov

How would I explain to him that I couldn't make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him? — Milan Kundera

When we say that this definition of good and evil is objective, what we mean is that it is as objective as we can be at this time, and to the best of our knowledge about the universe. This definition is based on what we know about how the universe works.
It is not based on the revealed wisdom of any one faith or political movement. It is common to the best principles of all of them, but it is based on what we know rather than what we believe. In that sense, it is objective. Of course, what we know about the universe, and our place in it, is constantly changing as we add more information and gain new insights. We are never perfectly objective about anything, that is true, but we can be less objective, or we can be more objective. — Gregory David Roberts

The human person, whose definition serves as the touchstone according to which good must be distinguished from evil, is considered as sacred, in what one might call the ritual sense of the word. It has something of that transcendental majesty which the churches of all times have given to their Gods. — Emile Durkheim

Dost thou renounce Satan, and all his Angels, and all his works, and all his services, and all his pride?" ...
The first act of the Christian life is a renunciation, a challenge. No one can be Christ's until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it. How far is this spirit from the way in which we often proclaim, or to use a more modern term, "sell" Christianity today! ... How could we then speak of "fight" when the very set-up of our churches must, by definition, convey the idea of softness, comfort, peace? ... One does not see very well where and how "fight" would fit into the weekly bulletin of a suburban parish, among all kings of counseling sessions, bake sales, and "young adult" get-togethers ...
"Dost thou unite thyself unto Christ? — Alexander Schmemann

Looking over world literature, it is almost impossible to find a single sympathetic representation of a moneylender- or anyway, a professional moneylender, which means by definition one who charges interest. I'm not sure there is another profession (executioners?) with such a consistently bad image. It's especially remarkable when one considers that unlike executioners, usurers often rank among the richest and most powerful people in their communities. Yet the very name, "usurer," evokes images of loan sharks, blood money, pounds of flesh, the selling of souls, and behind them all, the Devil, often represented as himself a kind of usurer, an evil accountant with his books and ledgers. — David Graeber

The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in government are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil ... Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit ... — Edmund Burke

Definition of Good and Evil: Good is what you like. Evil is what you don't like. — Anton Szandor LaVey

What do scientists mean when they talk of a virus? This is not quite so elementary as some people might believe. In The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, a virus is defined as "a morbid principle, or a poisonous venom, especially one capable of being introduced into another person or animal." The dictionary takes its cue from the Latin virus, which denotes a slimy liquid, a poison, an offensive odor or taste. It is a colorful definition, redolent of medieval notions of disease origins in evil emanations, but it offers little by way of scientific understanding. — Frank Ryan

In the Garden story, good and evil are found on the same tree, not in separate orchards. Good and evil give meaning and definition to each other. If God, like us, is susceptible to immense pain, He is, like us, the greater in His capacity for happiness. The presence of such pain serves the larger purpose of God's master plan, which is to maximize the capacity for joy, or in other words, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." He can no more foster those ends in the absence of suffering and evil than one could find the traction to run or the breath to sing in the vacuum of space. God does not instigate pain or suffering, but He can weave it into His purposes. "God's power rests not on totalizing omnipotence, but on His ability to alchemize suffering, tragedy, and loss into wisdom, understanding, and joy. — Terryl L. Givens

God, by definition, is maximally competent. God, by definition, is maximally efficient. There are no mistakes. There can be no mistakes, no missteps, no lapses or miscalculations. What exists, exists because it was arranged for by the Catalogue of Catalogues that is the mind of God. Evil exists because it is meant to exist, and to even suggest it is the result of some personal ineptitude or imbecilic blunder in the design is athletically - historically - preposterous. — John Zande

You never learned the secret," said Roberta. "How to be a crazy motherfucker and get away with it. Everybody else does it. What, you didn't think they were all sane, did you? Not a one of them. They're all crazier than you and me put together. They just know how to fake it. You could too, but you've chosen to torture all of us instead. That's the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can't stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. It's like bugs under the skin. We have to destroy you. It's nothing personal. — Charlie Jane Anders

Its important to understand that a legalist isn't just someone with higher standards or more rules than you. A lot of us wrongly stereotype a legalistic person as one who doesn't go to the movies, or who thinks that any music with a beat is evil. Legalism is much more subtle and serious than that. Here's a simple definition that I use: Legalism is seeking to achieve forgiveness from God and acceptance by God through obedience to God. — C.J. Mahaney

Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity? Arthur C. Clarke, author — George Washington

The strange thing was how quiet everything became just in that moment. Everything. All of existence, covered in a thick, still blanket of complete silence. The screeching tires and the yelling all paused. And then it happened: the white flash. It was blinding, taking away all definition of earth and sky, leaving nothing visible but the awful purity of the white. I remember that I flinched instinctively. That was all I really had time to do. Then, as if to announce my passing and that of all three-hundred-and-fourteen other souls working the midnight shift at the plant, came the roar. It was a guttural thunderous growl, like some great evil had just been released into the world. After that ... — Dennis Sharpe

There is no objective and universally acceptable definition of good and evil. And until we have one, we will go on justifying our own actions, while condemning the actions of the others. — Gregory David Roberts

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead. — Matt Taibbi

Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, made a comment that sounds almost prophetic now: that the happy, primitive society (which, by the way, never existed) is lost for all those who have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, Popper warns, the more certainly we will reach the Inquisition, the secret police, and a romanticized gangsterism. But once the existential problems of the individual, who is good by nature, can be blamed on the "evil" society, nothing stands in the way of sheer imagination. The definition of the benevolent society free of all power is only a question of fantasy. — Paul Watzlawick

Some words we use all the time are difficult to define when we actually have to think about them. We use the word "evil" all the time but when asked to define what we are talking about, it can be quite difficult.

Think about evil as you would think of counterfeit currency. A counterfeit is the corruption of something real. You can have real currency without the existence of any counterfeits. You cannot, however, have counterfeits without the real thing existing first. Evil is dependent on the existence of goodness but goodness is not dependent on evil. Goodness was there first. It is an absolute. Evil must always be thought of in relationship with absolute goodness. — Jon Morrison

Hannah Arendt in her study of totalitarianism borrowed from Immanuel Kant the concept of radical evil, of evil that's so evil that in the end it destroys itself, it's so committed to evil and it's so committed to hatred and cruelty that it becomes suicidal. My definition of it is the surplus value that's generated by totalitarianism. It means you do more violence, more cruelty than you absolutely have to to stay in power. — Christopher Hitchens

The closed language does not demonstrate and explain it communicates decision, dictum, command. Where it defines, the definition becomes "separation of good from evil;" it establishes unquestionable — Herbert Marcuse

We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist - marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil. — Andrea Dworkin

The core problem seems to lie in the classical-philosophical equation of power with control, and thus omnipotence with omnicontrol, an equation that forces the problem of evil to be seen as a problem of God's sovereignty. If it is accepted that God is all-loving and all-powerful, and if maximum power is defined as maximum control, then by definition there seems to be no place for evil. If goodness controls all things, all things must me good. — Gregory A. Boyd

So if all what I've said is the definition of insanity then the next thing is how do you define an evil bastard? People can mix evil and insanity up, thinking both to be the one and self same thing ... wrong! Let me tell you about evil, first you smell it, secondly you feel it, thirdly you taste it and finally you need to destroy it. — Stephen Richards

Although, of course, my definition of evil is not everybody else's. Evil is being involved in the glamour and charm of material existence, glamour in its old Gaelic sense meaning enchantment with the look of things, rather than the soul of things. — Kenneth Anger

He offered a crystal-clear notion of right and wrong, an unambiguous definition of good and evil. And although his perspective was absolutist and unyielding, it presented a kinder, gentler alternative to Calvinism, which had been the ecclesiastical status quo in the early years of the American republic. — Jon Krakauer

My definition of evil is unfriendliness — Muhammad Ali

And if you did this, if you saved your mother from this vicious killer, would you be doing the wrong thing or the right thing?"
"The right thing," I said just as swiftly.
"No, Lin, I'm afraid not," he frowned. "We have just seen that in the terms of this new, objective definition of good and evil, killing is always wrong because, if everyone did it, we would not move toward God, the ultimate complexity, with the rest of the universe. So it is wrong to kill. But your reasons were good. So therefore, the truth of this decision is that you did the wrong thing, for the right reasons ... — Gregory David Roberts

You've asked enough questions about evil. But you never asked once about love."
So I asked him to tell me about it, but of course his definition lay beyond words. He just went on sitting with me in the dark and taking the weight of my pain. — Susan Howatch

There are many people like me who believe firmly, if somewhat incoherently, that pockets on this planet are filled with what humans have left behind them, both good and evil, and that any such spiritual accumulation can stay there forever, past definition of such a stern word. — M.F.K. Fisher

And that brings me to my definition of power, which is simply this: the capacity to make others do what you would have them do. It sounds menacing, doesn't it? We don't like to talk about power. We find it scary. We find it somehow evil. We feel uncomfortable naming it. In the culture and mythology of democracy, power resides with the people. — Eric Liu

If the majority is moral then why do they need to be ruled by a group of people who are power hungry and gun hungry and probably not quite so good? And evil people want two things: they want something for nothing, and to escape the consequences of their actions, which is pretty much the definition of what government is. — Stefan Molyneux

One person's definition of evil is another person's different definition. — Eric Schmidt