Evil

Evil  (enemy image)

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Hannah Arendt	“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”	Hannah Arendt
Enemy image	“The events of 9/11, we were told, changed everything. The globe was now divided between the forces of good and evil. Bush communicated this quite clearly in an address to the nation just days after 9/11: “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.””	Danny Sjursen	25 October 2017
Escape From Evil	“In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man's ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate. This is the main argument of my book, and in the following chapters I want to try to show exactly how this comes about, how man's impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil in the world.”	Ernest Becker	1976
Escape From Evil	“All our human problems, with their intolerable sufferings, arise from man's ceaseless attempts to make this material world into a man-made reality ... aiming to achieve on earth a "perfection" which is only to be found in the beyond ...thereby hopelessly confusing the values of both spheres.”	Otto Rank
Escape From Evil	“What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity; and this very triumph ushers in an ominous new problem. Since men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live, onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite duration of some kind, a new kind of instability and anxiety are created. And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs of men. In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man's ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.”	Ernest Becker	1976
Escape From Evil	“The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil. The evil that troubles man most is his vulnerability [i.e. mortality]; he seems impotent to guarantee the absolute meaning of his life, its significance in the cosmos.”	Ernest Becker	1976
Hero image	“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart —and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”	Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn	1973
Human nature	“[H]uman nature is not as neutral as Rousseau and Marx wanted; nor is it as ineluctably evil as conservatives like to make out in order to keep the status quo.”	Ernest Becker	1976

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