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All evils are equal when they are extreme.

— Pierre Corneille Horace (1639)

Tous maux sont pareils alors qu’ils sont extrêmes.

Original text (French)

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Notes from Wikiquote

Sabine, act III, scene iv.

Topics

Good and Evil

More quotes by Pierre Corneille

Brave men are brave from the very first.

Le Cid (1636)

As great as kings may be, they are what we are: they can err like other men.

Le Cid (1636)

Oh, how sweet it is to pity the fate of an enemy, when we have no longer anything to fear from him!

La Mort de Pompée (1643)

Who is all-powerful should fear everything.

Cinna (1641)

He who is insulted has a right to be outraged, as unpunished audacity only increases!

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False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Socrates

I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

Edward Teller

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

C. S. Lewis God in the Dock (1970)

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Pierre Corneille (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.