Fritz Eichenberg
The image/symbol for this theme is Smerdyakov from Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, an image fitting because of his complexity. Though guilty of one of the most heinous crimes—killing his father—his story is much too involved to fit neatly into a bad vs. good category. His convoluted psychology and mysterious history expose the inter-relatedness of the culpability for his actions and validate one of Dostoevsky’s favorite themes, the responsibility we all share “to all, for all, and for everything.”
The problem of evil perhaps poses the greatest challenge to theistic tracitions. Most often, “God” seems to be a projection in human terms and this brings about searing contradictions. The pre-Socratic philosophers debated this. They questioned the discrepancy between the idea of a benevolent God coexisting with evil in the world. If God is omnipotent and benevolent, why doesn’t he prevent pain and suffering? Epicurus reconciled this by proposing that the universe is so large, He doesn’t have time, humans aren’t the priority. But beyond that, doesn’t the reality of evil imply an incompetent “Creator?” The theistic interpretations of “God” all seem to fall apart because of the reality of evil.
“Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for... surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.”
“He does mischief to himself who does mischief to another, and evil planned harms the plotter most.”
“Man’s duty is three-fold: To make him who is an enemy a friend, to make him who is wicked righteous; and to make him who is ignorant learned.”
“An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.”
“When a student asked Confucius about returning good for evil, he replied: 'With what then will you recompense kindness? Return good for good, and for evil, justice.'”
“It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war who an thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on.”
“For men to get all they wish is not the better thing; it is disease that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; toil rest”
“No intelligent man believes that anybody ever willing errs or willingly does base and evil deeds.”
“One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.”
“God either wants to take away evil from the world and cannot; or he can, and does not want to; or he neither can nor will; or, lastly, he both wants to and can... if he is willing to remove evil and cannot, he is not omnipotent; if he can but will not, that is meanness; if he is neither able nor willing, he is both mean and powerless; if both able and willing, how does evil come to be on earth?”
“The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so cannot, or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are both able and willing. I they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can, but will not, then they are not benevolent If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it exist?”
“No evil is honorable: but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil.”
“If we may find anything that approaches permanence in the midst of change, it is the lasting power of goodness. Evil destroys the doer, but good endures.”
“Politicians and generals who treat people like animals to be driven and sacrificed are the ultimate expression of man’s inhumanity to man.”
“He who takes up the sword will perish by the sword. Do you think that evil can be overcome by evil, or violence by violence?”
“Do not leave alive a single soul, completely destroy them—the Hittities, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you”
“Evil does not naturally dwell in the world, in events, or in people. Evil is a by-product of forgetfulness, laziness, or distraction: it arises when we lose sight of our true aim in life.”
“How do you think you can help mundane beings with gold? It will only cause greater conflict and strife, greater sin and evil.”
“Give tidings of painful doom to those who disbelieve... Slay the idolaters wherever you find them... and fight until persecution is no more, and religion is all for Allah.”
“Evil has its evil reward. Even the clever cannot escape… its retribution is ingenious and beyond the reach of human plans. It never lets evildoers slip through its net.”
“Never suppose that either the evil or the good that you do will remain secret, however strict may be your enclosure.”
“Good without evil is like light with out darkness which in turn is like righteousness without hope.”
“Friendship multiplies the good life, divides the evil, guards against misfortune, and brings fresh air to the soul.”
“Be more careful not to miss once than to hit a hundred times… Evil news carries farther than any applause… All the exploits of a person taken together are not enough to wipe out a single small blemish.”
“All the excesses, all the violence, and all the vanity of great men, come from the fact that they know not what they are”
“The Inquisition is well known to be an admirable and truly Christian invention for increasing the power of the popes and monks, and rendering the population of a whole kingdom hypocrites.”
“There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils,”
“Society [culture] is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness. Society is a blessing; government even in its best state a necessary evil, a tyranny; and because—even in its best state—an evil, we should have as little of it as the general peace of human society will permit.”
“No one chooses evil because it is evil; we only mistake it for happiness, the good we seek.”
“A moment's realization of the luminosity of one's mind purifies the accumulated evil deeds and obscurations of countless aeons.”
“The chief source of the serious evils which affect man is man himself: homo homini lupus.”
“Man cannot spend all his time doing evil, and even in the company of pirates there must be some sweet moments on their sinister ship when you feel as if you were aboard a pleasure yacht.”
“Adverse conditions are spiritual friends… Illness is the broom for evil and obscurations. Suffering is the dance of what is.”
“You may either win your peace or buy it; win it by resistance to evil, buy it by compromise with evil.”
“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”
“the soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.”
“People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel.”
“If the evil doing of men moves you to indignation… understand that you, too, are guilty, for you might have been a light to the evildoers who might have been saved by your light.”
“The deadliest enemies of nations are not their foreign foes; they always dwell within their own borders. And from these internal enemies civilization is always in need o being saved.”
“The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly has made the world evil and ugly.”
“The irresistible natural truth which we all abhor and repudiate: the greatest of our evils and the worst of our crimes is poverty, and that our first duty is not to be poor.”
“To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love... the glories of war are all blood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.”
“I am aware that your view of life regards such spoliations as virtuous acts. But we have been taught from childhood to regard them as acts degrading humanity... The rulers may have our land and bodies but not our souls... You are leaving no legacy to your people of which they would feel proud.”
“In my garden I understand dimly why evil is in the world and in my garden learn how transitory it is.”
“How can we know whether a thing is evil until we reach the end of it? It may be good!”
“an uncertain hypothesis cannot justify a certain evil unless an equal evil is equally certain on the opposite hypothesis.”
“We suffer not only the evils that actually befall us, but all those what our intelligence tells us we have reason to fear... forethought averts physical disaster at the cost of worry, and general lack of joy.”
“We stand face to face with the terrible question of evil an do not even know what is before us, let along what to pit against it... Touching evil brings with it the grave peril of succumbing to it... Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and the evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole.”
“All evil is relative. Something what is evil at one level of evolution can be good at an earlier stage because it provides the essential stimulus for development.”
“To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed... There is nothing sweeter in the world.”
“The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”
“Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?”
“Never in my life had I felt so tangibly and with such astonishment that hate, by passing successively through comprehension, mercy, and sympathy, can be transformed into love. The same can happen when good wrestles with evil”
“The Inquisition left its evil mark on European society, made torture a recognized part of legal procedure, and drove men back from the adventure of reason into a fearful and stagnant conformity.”
“cruelty is the memory—if only in the blood—of a time when the test of survival was the ability to kill... Pugnacity, brutality, greed, and sexual readiness were advantages in the struggle for existence.”
“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
“I want war. To me all means will be right. My motto is 'Destroy him by all and any means.' I am the one who will wage the war!”
“Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.”
“Curse all these men who come into the world to upset it with wars! and curse them for spoiling our homes and fouling our women and making our life a thing of fear and emptiness! Curse such childish men that cannot have done with fights and quarrels in childhood... Curse all women who give birth to men who make war, and curse their grandmothers and all who are their kin!”
“Good is all that serves life, evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life... and all that enhances life. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it to pieces.”
“Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
“By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”
“the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality… It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations… to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.”
“One can clearly see here that Buddhism is strongly opposed to any kind of war, when it lays down that trade in arms and lethal weapons is an evil and unjust means of livelihood.”
“One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals... This is the belief that... there is a final solution.”
“There is evil. It’s actual like cement… It’s an ingredient in us. In the world. Poured over us, filtering into our bodies, minds, hearts, into the pavement itself.”
“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.”
“He never spoke with any bitterness at all, no matter how awful the things he said. Are there really people without resentment, without hate she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it?”
“no act is evil in itself; man puts the evil into it by the motive with which he commits it... Evil cannot coexist without the striving to 'live more abundantly' which is the ultimate aim of religion.”
“Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power... Evil is never intended as evil... it originates in the desire to eliminate evil... arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion.
”
“Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.”
“Henry Ford modeled his assembly line car production after visiting a Chicago slaughterhouse… and immediately saw that it was a perfect model for the automobile industry… Later, the Nazis used the same slaughterhouse model for their mass murders in the concentration camps… Ford openly admired the Nazis' efficiency. Hitler returned the admiration… and kept a life-sized portrait of the automobile mogul in his office.”
“While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the President of the United States sometimes must have
To stand naked.”
“In this world there is no absolute good, no absolute evil. Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa… The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil… Indeed, balance itself is the good.”
“Every day in the United States, nearly 200,000 people are sickened by foodborne disease, 900 are hospitalized, and fourteen die. . . . Most of these cases are never reported to the authorities or properly diagnosed.”
“Slavery is not a condition. Slavery is a cult. Human trafficking is a cult. Slavery got a rebrand, the Alt Right. These dazzling new plantation owners built a pipeline to take our children from school to prison quicker than a cut can bleed. And the lucky ones go from school to the NFL where they don't even let them niggahs take a knee.”
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