
“Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.”
Source: Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 8, "The Children of the Open Sea"
“Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me.”
Source: Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
“Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two.”
The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1956 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.12
Context: The second class of evils comprises such evils as people cause to each other, when, e. g., some of them use their strength against others. These evils are more numerous than those of the first kind... they likewise originate in ourselves, though the sufferer himself cannot avert them.
Peace and the Public Mind (1935)
Context: The force which makes for war does not derive its strength from the interested motives of evil men; it derives its strength from the disinterested motives of good men. Pacifists have sometimes evaded that truth as making too great a concession to Mars, as seeming to imply (which it does not in fact) that in order to abolish war, men must cease to be noble.
Base motives are, of course, among those which make up the forces that produce war. Base motives are among those which get great cathedrals built and hospitals constructed-contractors' profit-seeking, the vested interests of doctors and clergy. But Europe has not been covered by cathedrals because contractors wanted to make money, or priests wanted jobs.
“Better is art, than evil strength; for with art men may hold what strength may not obtain.”
Source: Brut, Line 8590; vol. 2, p. 297.
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
Context: The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness, of others' strength and greatness. He is proud of his great generals but not proud of himself. He admires thought which he did not have and not the thought he did have. He believes in things all the more thoroughly the less he comprehends them, and does not believe in the correctness of those ideas which he comprehends most easily.