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"Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil?" John Milton   "Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on." Ron Rosenbaum   "The Americans are not cynics, they are optimists; and optimism is in itself a sign of innocence. He who is blameless in thought and deed is led not, to be sure, to deny that evil exists, but to refuse to believe in the necessity of evil, to refuse to admit that evil is inevitable and incurable. The Americans believe that misery, hunger, pain and everything else can be combated, that men can recover from misery, hunger and pain, that there is a remedy for all evil. They do not know that evil is incurable." Curzio Malaparte   "Evil is always evil, and it may be thought of, perhaps, as essentially destructive, a willed and deliberate negation of organic life. It is always evil to kill another human being, even though it is sometimes right to do so. It is probably evil to kill any organism, even the bullocks and sheep we need for our nutriment. To be a carnivore is neither right nor wrong, at least in Western society: it is a thing of neutral significance. Hinduism feels so strongly about the sanctity of all life that it opposes the killing of anything, for food or even, at times, for self-protection. It is permissible to use a mosquito net but not to swat the insects. I have seen Hindu workmen holding up great constructive enterprises in order to look after the welfare of the crawling life dug up with the spade or shovel." Anthony Burgess   "What greater fault than that by which we all die? And what greater goodness than that by which we are freed from death? And certainly, unless Adam had sinned, it would not have behooved our Redeemer to take on our flesh. Almighty God saw beforehand that from that evil because of which men were to die, He would bring about a good which would overcome that evil. How wonderfully the good surpasses the evil, what faithful believer can fail to see? Great, indeed, are the evils we deservedly suffer in consequence of the first sin; but who of the elect would not willingly endure still worse evils, rather than not have so great a Redeemer?" Gregorius Anicius   "Deep within us we each have the capacity for good and for evil. I am taught that good overcomes evil, if we choose that outcome. I feel it coming." Al Gore   "The evil is in the White House at the present. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He's cold. He's mean. He's got ice water for blood." Tip O'Neill   "As time rolled on, it became clear to everyone except English teachers that Steinbeck had gotten everything wrong in The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps deliberately. He was even off on Dust Bowl geography, having the Joads begin their California-bound trek in Sallisaw, in eastern Oklahoma, near the Arkansas border, where they have lost the family farm thanks to evil banks and evil machines such as tractors. In reality, the Dust Bowl of the early 1930s in Oklahoma was confined to the state's western panhandle." Charlotte Allen   "If we are Pelagians, we accept that man has total liberty of moral choice. To remove that choice is to dehumanize. Evil is at its most spectacular when it enjoys turning a living soul into a manipulable object. To confer death is evil enough, but torture has always been regarded as worse." Anthony Burgess   "Evil is the curse of the world, and that is why I must keep wizards, who are its agents, carriers, and propagators, as far away from myself and my clan as possible; their presence poisons the air, spreads disease, and makes life impossible, turning it into its opposite—death. The wizard, by definition, lives and practices among others, in another village, in another clan or tribe. Our contemporary suspicion of and antipathy for the Other, the Stranger, goes back to the fear our tribal ancestors felt toward the Outsider, seeing him as the carrier of evil, the source of misfortune. Pain, fire, disease, drought, and hunger did not come from nowhere. Someone must have brought them, inflicted them, disseminated them. But who? Not my people, not those closest to me—they are good. Life is possible only among good people, and I am alive, after all. The guilty are therefore the Others, the Strangers. That is why, seeking retribution for our injuries and setbacks, we quarrel with them, enter into conflicts, conduct wars. In a word, if unhappiness has befallen us, its source is not within us, but elsewhere, outside, beyond us and our community, 'far away,' in Others." Ryszard Kapuscinski   "Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring." Simone Weil   "The unthinking repeat the cliche about the infinite worth of the individual, but are stirred up only when there are enough individuals to bother about. I quite understand how we are driven to lead statistical lives, but I repeat that it is the duty of art to make us imagine the particular; to make us understand that the rights of one human being are not a fraction of the rights of more than one, and at the same time that in any situation of collective evil, the suffering is felt by no more than one person; only one feels the bitter agony of injustice, only one dies. Consequently the massacre of a hundred people is not a hundred times more wicked than the wanton killing of one; neither is negligible; they are equal. Evil may be repeated, but is not added up or multiplied." Jacques Barzun   "Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppressions of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears. To justify suppression of free speech there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent. There must be reasonable ground to believe that the evil to be prevented is a serious one." Louis Brandeis   "To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom." Louis Brandeis   "It often happens that reforms merely have the effect of transferring the undesirable tendencies of individuals from one channel to another channel. An old outlet for some particular wickedness is closed; but a new outlet is opened. The wickedness is not abolished; it is merely provided with a different set of opportunities for self-expression. It would be possible to write a most illuminating History of Sin, showing the extent to which the various tendencies to bad behaviour have been given opportunities in the different civilizations of the world, enumerating the defects of every culture's specific virtues, tracing the successive metamorphoses of evil under changing technological and political conditions. Consider, by way of example, the recent history of that main source of evil, the lust for power, the craving for personal success and dominance. In this context we may describe the passage from medieval to modern conditions as a passage from violence to cunning, from the conception of power in terms of military prowess and the divine right of aristocracy to its conception in terms of finance. In the earlier period the sword and the patent of nobility are at once the symbols and the instruments of domination. In the later period their place is taken by money." Aldous Huxley   "What is it people like about Darth Vader? Is it that he's so evil, or that he's so good at his job?" Vince Gilligan   "The war has not gone well, and increasingly in an almost primitive reaction to which modern societies are as much exposed as any Stone Age clan it has been judged that this is because the gods are against it. In modern parlance this means that the evil military industrial complex has embarked on a racist colonialist adventure. (I have heard the head of SNCC state that we were in Vietnam 'for the rice supplies.') But the essential point is that we have been losing a war, and this more than any single thing erodes the authority of a government, however stable, just, well-intentioned or whatever. I would imagine that the desire not to be the first President to 'lose' a war has been much in President Johnson's mind over the past years, and explains some of his conduct. But the fact is that he could not win, and the all-important accompanying fact is that the semi-violent domestic protest that arose in consequence forced him to resign. In a sense he was the first American President to be toppled by a mob. No matter that it was a mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe girls." Daniel Patrick Moynihan   "To the eighteenth-century liberal, to the old-fashioned nineteenth-century liberal, that is to say to all professed liberals, brought up to be against the government on principle, this organised clairvoyance will be the most hateful of dreams. Perhaps, too, the individualist would see it in that light. But these are only the mental habits acquired in an evil time. The old liberalism assumed bad government, the more powerful the government the worse it was, just as it assumed the natural righteousness of the free individual." Herbert George Wells   "A persistent civil war rages within all our lives. Something within us causes us to lament with Ovid, the Latin Poet, 'I see and approve the better things, but follow worse.' Or to agree with Plato that human personality is like a charioteer having two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in a different direction. Or to repeat the Apostle Paul, 'The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.'" Martin Luther King   "Though Aristotle admired some aged philosophers, he also wrote that most old people were pessimistic, distrustful, malicious, suspicious, small-minded, and continually reminiscing about their past, but so humbled by their failures that they have no greater ambition than to remain alive. The Roman aristocracy was paralysed by bitter opposition between fathers and sons. In India, the old were encouraged by their religion to withdraw from worldly activity and prepare for death. 'Better is a poor and wise child,' said the Old Testament, 'than an old and foolish king.' For all the supposed wisdom that experience produced, the ancient Egyptians hated the disabilities of age: Ptah Hotep, chief minister of the Pharaoh, said in 2450 B.C. that what old age does to man is evil—weakness, forgetfulness and pain. It was his civilization that invented anti-aging wrinkle cream." Theodore Zeldin