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For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.

— Yann Martel Life of Pi (2001)

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Good and Evil

More quotes by Yann Martel

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.

Life of Pi (2001)

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language.

Beatrice & Virgil (2010)

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Life of Pi (2001)

To my mind, faith is like being in the sun. When you are in the sun, can you avoid creating a shadow?

Beatrice & Virgil (2010)

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

All Yann Martel quotes →

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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: Yann Martel (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.