Quotes & Sayings About Man's Capacity For Evil

There were good and bad in every race, no matter the color of a man's skin. If Adam had learned anything in his life it was that the human soul held a great capacity for both good and evil. — Anonymous

There are people who claim to love humanity, while others object that we can love only in the singular, that is, only individuals. I agree and add that what goes for love also goes for hate. Man, this being pining for equilibrium, balances the weight of the evil piled on his back with the weight of his hatred. But try directing your hatred at mere abstract principles, at injustice, fanaticism, cruelty, or, if you've managed to find the human principle itself hateful, then try hating mankind! Such hatreds are beyond human capacity, and so man, if he wishes to relieve his anger (aware as he is of its limited power) concentrates it on a single individual. — Milan Kundera

Man hovers between Paradise and the Pit," Gordinus told her cheerfully. "Sometimes rising to one, sometimes swooping to the other. To ignore his capacity for evil is as obtuse as blinding oneself to the heights to which he can soar. — Ariana Franklin

Man's strength resides in his capacity and desire to elevate himself, so as to attain the good. To travel step by step toward the heights. And that is all he can do. To reach heaven and remain there is beyond his powers: Even Moses had to return to earth. Is it the same for evil? — Elie Wiesel

People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do -after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty. — William Faulkner

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother. In spite of death, the mark and seal of the parental control, man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is aquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life. — Bertrand Russell

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge
he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil
he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor
he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire
he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy
all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is desired to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was
that robot of the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love
he was not man. — Ayn Rand

I mean that a battered child has a marvelous capacity to adjust to his torture and will ceaselessly love his battering parents. I mean that the mother of a sexually molested child will not leave nor truly protect the child from the father as long as the man has a good job or otherwise preserves that mother from an economic life which is more horrifying to her than the molestation of her child. I mean that the weakness of the human race is stupefying and that it's not the capacity for evil which astounds young policemen like you and me, Dean. Rather it's the mind boggling worthlessness of human beings. There's not enough dignity in mankind for evil and that's the most terrifying thing a policeman learns. — Joseph Wambaugh

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation. — Graham Greene

Man is capable of greatness, love, nobility, compassion. Yet never forget that his capacity for evil is infinite. It is a sad truth, boy, that if you sit now and think of the worst tortures that could ever be inflicted on another human being, they will already have been practiced somewhere. If there is one sound that follows the march of humanity, it is the scream. — David Gemmell

Let us not paralyze our capacity for good by brooding of man's capacity for evil. — David Sarnoff

Narcissism is, in a sense, the converse of an habitual sense of sin; it consists in the habit of admiring oneself and wishing to be admired. Up to a point it is, of course, normal, and not to be deplored; it is only in its excesses that it becomes a grave evil. In many women, especially rich Society women, the capacity for feeling love is completely dried up, and is replaced by a powerful desire that all men should love them. When a woman of this kind is sure that a man loves her, she has no further use for him. The same thing occurs, though less frequently, with men; the classic example is the hero of Liaisons Dangereuses. When vanity is carried to this height, there is no genuine interest in any other person, and therefore no real satisfaction to be obtained from love. — Bertrand Russell

Martin Buber suggested that evil prevailed because of the inability of man to imagine the real. Yet human beings do have that capacity. Lord Byron, a poet favored by Alfred Nobel, captured the stark essence of a post-nuclear world in his poem Darkness: — Bernard Lown

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