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Evil men of every degree will use you, flatter you, lead you on until you are useless; then, if the virtuous do not pity you, or God compassionate, you are without a friend in the universe.

— Henry Ward Beecher Lectures to Young Men (1844)

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Good and Evil

More quotes by Henry Ward Beecher

The call to religion is not a call to be better than your fellows, but to be better than yourself.

Life Thoughts (1858)

When laws, customs, or institutions cease to be beneficial to man, they cease to be obligatory.

Life Thoughts (1858)

He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.

Lectures to Young Men (1844)

Flowers are the sweetest things that God ever made, and forgot to put a soul into.

Life Thoughts (1858)

There is no such thing as preaching patience into people, unless the sermon is so long that they have to practise it while they hear.

Life Thoughts (1858)

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