“Perish with him the folly that seeks through evil good.”
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery
Brown of Ossawatomie, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Odysseus, Book VIII, line 770
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)
“Perish with him the folly that seeks through evil good.”
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery
Brown of Ossawatomie, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright
What is the New Element in the Norwegian School?
1890s, Quintessence Of Ibsenism (1891; 1913)
“No, trust the Muse: she opes the good man's grave,
And lifts him to the gods.”
John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar
Book IV, ode viii
Translations, The Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace (1863)
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Source: 1910s, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays http://archive.org/stream/mysticism00russuoft/mysticism00russuoft_djvu.txt (1918), Ch. 1: Mysticism and Logic
Thomas à Kempis (1380–1471) German canon regular
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 545.
Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Polish writer
"Our Century's Decline"
Poems New and Collected (1998), The People on the Bridge (1986)
“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer
Variant: No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.