“Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”

1848
Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)

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Nathaniel Hawthorne128

American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879) 1804–1864

Al-Baladhuri (806–892) historian

About Ibn Samurah at Seistan. Futuhu’l-Buldan by al-Biladhuri. in Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, Vol. II, pp. 413-14.

“It’s amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them.”

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) American novelist

Source: Marjorie's Three Gifts

“All tyrants, past, present and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power and how malignant their evil.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Emancipation Proclamation Centennial Address (1962)
Context: If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power and how malignant their evil.

“Believe me, no one is completely good. Similarly, no one is completely evil. It depends on where you stand, and how you look at it. Protagonists and antagonists only exist in fiction.”

Titon Rahmawan

“You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.”

Jim Butcher Proven Guilty

Source: Proven Guilty

“Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them.”

Michel De Montaigne (1533–1592) (1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, statesman

Source: The Essays: A Selection

“A word or a form of speech is not good because it is in the dictionary, but is in the dictionary because it was good before it found its way there.”

Francesco Maria Zanotti (1692–1777) Italian philosopher

Una parola o forma di dire non è buona perchè è nel Vocabulario, ma è nel Vocabulario perchè era buona anche prima di esservi.
XIX.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 434.
Paradossi

“True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good--and we all know how rare that is…”

Jasper Fforde book The Eyre Affair

Source: The Eyre Affair

“One must know how to enter the ideas of others and how to leave them. One must know how to leave one's own ideas and how to come back to them.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“It's all of the good that won't come out of us and how eventually our hands will just turn to dust, if we keep shaking them standing here on this frozen lake.”

Jenny Lewis (1976) American actor, singer-songwriter

"The Good That Won't Come Out"
Song lyrics, The Execution of All Things (2003)

“Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”

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