There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
Henry David Thoreau

I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.
Lao Tzu

Obviously one must hold oneself responsible for the evil impulses of one's dreams. In what other way can one deal with them? Unless the content of the dream rightly understood is inspired by alien spirits, it is part of my own being.
Sigmund Freud

Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
Plato

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
Plato

Entire ignorance is not so terrible or extreme an evil, and is far from being the greatest of all; too much cleverness and too much learning, accompanied with ill bringing-up, are far more fatal.
Plato

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.
Plato

To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he might have the less.
Plato

Knowledge becomes evil if the aim be not virtuous.
Plato

Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
Plato

Violence isn't always evil. What's evil is the infatuation with violence.
Jim Morrison

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind.
Jonathan Swift

Because parents have power over children. They feel they have to do what their parents say. But the love of money is the root of all evil. And this is a sweet child. And to see him turn like this, this isn't him. This is not him.
Michael Jackson

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine

Little evil would be done in the world if evil never could be done in the name of good.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

There is no possible source of evil except good.
Saint Augustine

Passion is the evil in adultery. If a man has no opportunity of living with another man's wife, but if it is obvious for some reason that he would like to do so, and would do so if he could, he is no less guilty than if he was caught in the act.
Saint Augustine

He that is kind is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.
Saint Augustine

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.
Saint Augustine