Matthew Scully Quotes

The better day, the worse deed.

Thus does a 'necessary evil' become an idol. Maybe we're stuck with it. But do we have to worship it?

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.

About the nature of human beings. I discovered that confronted by temptation, we will always fall. Given the right circumstances, every human being on this earth would be willing to commit evil.

Temptation is a suggested short cut to the realization of the highest at which I aim - not towards what I understand as evil, but towards what I understand as good.

As sure as God is good, so surely there is no such thing as necessary evil.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.

It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

There are times when the end justifies the means. But when you build an argument based on a whole series of such times, you may find that you've constructed an entire philosophy of evil." --Luke Skywalker

Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil.

Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil thinks of things good folks can't think of.

I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.

As the mind of each man is conscious of good or evil, so does he conceive within his breast hope or fear, according to his actions.

Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.

The attempt to remove evil from the world by killing a thousand evil - doers, only adds to the evil in the world.

If you are picking the lesser of two evils, you are still picking Evil.

If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act.

We never do evil so thoroughly and heartily as when led to it by an honest but perverted, because mistaken, conscience.

Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all.

For where the instrument of intelligence is added to brute power and evil will, mankind is powerless in its own defense.

The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.

Of two evils, choose the more interesting.