I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.
In searching for a rationale to go to war, Bush settled on the notion of Saddam as an incarnation of evil, basically, and convinced himself that Saddam was fundamentally Adolf Hitler reborn. I think his feelings towards Saddam were in fact quite genuine and quite legitimately hostile. He was not play acting.
As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.
Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings.
Much that we call evil is really good in disguises; and we should not quarrel rashly with adversities not yet understood, nor overlook the mercies often bound up in them.
Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.
I did not feel 'evil' when I wrote advertisements for Puerto Rico. They helped attract industry and tourists to a country which had been living on the edge of starvation for 400 years.
I don't think quotas are necessarily an evil. I think when we look at industry in general back to the '60s and the '50s, the way more diverse people like my dad and mom's generation were able to break into industry was because of affirmation action, because of quotas.
Afghans long ago resigned themselves to this sort of thing. Compromises must be made. Deals with the devil are better than ceaseless butchery. In the exigencies of post-conflict bygones, against the threat of collapse into more terrible bloodletting, the ugliness of realpolitik is the lesser evil.
Our task, in the aftermath of September 11, was and continues to be the transformation of the effects of evil into something beautiful and good.
In my opinion, Hollywood doesn't know the context. Hollywood sees a David and Goliath story with Israel being cast in the role of Goliath, as the evil aggressor. The Palestinians are simply innocent reactors to whatever Israelis are throwing at them. And everything - like their economic situation - excuses the savagery.
I think that, hundreds of years from now, if people invent a technology that we haven't heard of yet, maybe a computer could turn evil. But the future is so uncertain. I don't know what's going to happen five years from now. The reason I say that I don't worry about AI turning evil is the same reason I don't worry about overpopulation on Mars.
I want to be evil! I did play Lady Macbeth on stage to Alec Baldwin's Macbeth back in New York in 1998. But I've played a lot of characters who are so righteous and understanding. I don't want to be a goody-goody two-shoes all the time.
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.
The wave of evil washes all our institutions alike.
As is well known, 'McCarthyism' was an alleged focus of political evil in the 1950s: Accusations of Communist taint, without factual basis; bogus lists of supposed Communists who never existed; failure in the end to produce even one provable Communist or Soviet agent, despite his myriad charges of subversion.
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
To reasoned people, almost everything is understandable, but evil is forever incomprehensible.
Although modesty is natural to man, it is not natural to children. Modesty only begins with the knowledge of evil.
A vigorous temper is not altogether an evil. Men who are easy as an old shoe are generally of little worth.
