Friends

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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.

 

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The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.

 

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At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

 

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At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political

 

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How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

 

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There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

 

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I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.

 

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Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

 

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Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

 

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It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb, said, "They all feed one another," and called it good.

 

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Death? Why this fuss about death. Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! ... Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

 

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The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

 

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All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

 

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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing

 

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Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.



Ernest Becker:

 

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In seeking to avoid evil, [humanity] is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is [our] ingenuity, rather than [our] animal nature, that has given [our] fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.

 

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Battle not with monsters
lest ye become a monster
and if you gaze into the abyss
the abyss gazes into you.

 

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It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

 

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What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

 

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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.