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The crest and crowning of all good,
Life’s final star, is Brotherhood;
For it will bring again to Earth
Her long-lost Poesy and Mirth;
Will send new light on every face,
A kingly power upon the race.
And till it come, we men are slaves,
And travel downward to the dust of graves.

— Edwin Markham The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1899)

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Good and Evil

More quotes by Edwin Markham

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.

The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (1899)

He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.

The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913)

I fear the vermin that shall undermine
Senate and citadel and school and shrine.

For over the world a dim hope hovers,
The hope at the heart of all our songs —
That the banded stars are in league with lovers,
And fight against their wrongs.

The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems (1913)

Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?

The Man With the Hoe (1898)

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