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We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible.

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Good and Evil

More quotes by Ptolemy

Everything that is hard to attain is easily assailed by the generality of men.

As material fortune is associated with the properties of the body, so honor belongs to those of the soul.

The length of lifetakes the leading place among inquiries about events following birth.

There are three classes of friendship and enmity, since men are so disposed to one another either by preference or by need or through pleasure and pain.

Ptolemy's Geography is the only book on cartography to have survived from the classical period and one of the most influential scientific works of all time.

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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)

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