“We are all the sum total of our pasts, good and evil.”
Source: She Is the Darkness (1997), Chapter 95 (p. 614)
“…there is a sum of evil equal to the sum of good, the continuing equilibrium of the world requires that there be as many good people as wicked people…”
Justine or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1787)
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Do you have more details about the quote "…there is a sum of evil equal to the sum of good, the continuing equilibrium of the world requires that there be as man…" by Marquis de Sade?
Marquis de Sade 30
French novelist and philosopher 1740–1814Related quotes
Source: The Ghost Brigades (2006), Chapter 5 (p. 113)
“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
T.S. Eliot
(1888–1965) 20th century English author
John Updike
(1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic
Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6; Gratia Dei sum quod sum translates to ”Thanks be to God that I am what I am”
I, 8
The City of God (early 400s)
Context: To the divine providence it has seemed good to prepare in the world to come for the righteous good things, which the unrighteous shall not enjoy; and for the wicked evil things, by which the good shall not be tormented. But as for the good things of this life, and its ills, God has willed that these should be common to both; that we might not too eagerly covet the things which wicked men are seen equally to enjoy, nor shrink with an unseemly fear from the ills which even good men often suffer.
There is, too, a very great difference in the purpose served both by those events which we call adverse and those called prosperous. For the good man is neither uplifted with the good things of time, nor broken by its ills; but the wicked man, because he is corrupted by this world’s happiness, feels himself punished by its unhappiness.
Steven Weinberg
(1933) American theoretical physicist
Address at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999)
This comment is modified in a later article derived from these talks:
:Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.
:* "A Designer Universe?" at PhysLink.com http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_weinberg.cfm
Opening line of novel.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965)