John Newton Quotes

It is very difficult to give a 15 second sound bite on why there is pain and suffering in this world and not have it come off as being flippant or surface level or superficial.

I don't really believe in evil at all.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

If there was no moral evil upon earth, there would be no physical evil.

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

I think that fiction is an excellent place for us to struggle with questions of good and evil, and humanity and inhumanity.

All my books are an inquiry into the nature of evil. Why do good people do bad things? Are any human beings completely evil? Do we all have good within us? That's what I'm interested in.

From the days of Cain and Abel, we know all too well there will always be evil. But that evil shouldn't take away our freedoms.

The problem of evil... Why does God permit it? Or, if God is omnipotent, in which case permission and creation are the same, why did God create it?

So be it. God created profoundly fallible creatures on this earth, and human history is mostly the story of error and accident.

Why do people hate God?... One, they hate the moral standard. Two, they hate the way he's transforming the world even in the midst of suffering and tragedy.

'Tis no sin to cheat the devil.

It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

The doctrine of original sin claims that all men sinned in Adam; but whether they did or whether it is merely a fact that all men sin does not basically affect the problem of suffering.

I don't give the devil credit for creating nothing.

Evil and good are God's right hand and left.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

Atheism is really nothing but a sorry litany of non-sequiturs, e.g., if God existed, why do we have all the evil and horrors in the world? But this presupposes that God is all-good, an obvious non-sequitur.

To me, evil comes when you have a choice between that and good, and you choose the wrong way.

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'