If it were possible to cure evils by lamentation and to raise the dead with tears, then gold would be a less valuable thing than weeping.
Sophocles

If there is a God, whence proceed so many evils? If there is no God, whence cometh any good?
Boethius

If there were a clear prospect that such evils were part of a barbarian past, then at least we might find a small crumb of comfort. No such prospect exists: no scientific analysis can even remotely answer or account for past and present horrors of human behaviour.
Simon Conway Morris

Ignorance is the mother of all evils.
Francois Rabelais

Imaginary evils are incurable.
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.
John Ruskin

In America, with all of its evils and faults, you can still reach through the forest and see the sun. But we don't know yet whether that sun is rising or setting for our country.
Dick Gregory

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.
John Morley

In the 1930s one was aware of two great evils - mass unemployment and the threat of war.
James Meade

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible.
Isaiah Berlin

It has always been a great wrong that these men and their families should be held in bondage. We of the North have hitherto acquiesced in it, lest, in the endeavor to redress it in violation of the Constitution, greater evils might ensue.
Jay Alan Sekulow

It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.
Herodotus

It is the strange fate of man, that even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt him.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It's pretty sad when you have to choose between the lesser of two evils.
Meg White

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.
Joseph Addison

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
Thomas Jefferson

Many of the railroad evils were inherent in the situation; they were explained by the fact that both managers and public were dealing with a new agency whose laws they did not completely understand.
John Moody

My friends, whoever has had experience of evils knows how whenever a flood of ills comes upon mortals, a man fears everything; but whenever a divine force cheers on our voyage, then we believe that the same fate will always blow fair.
Aeschylus

Of two evils choose the prettier.
Carolyn Wells

Of two evils we must always choose the least.
Thomas a Kempis