“I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. Government belongs wherever evil needs an adversary and there are people in distress.”

Source: Poverty (1912), p. v
Context: The evils of poverty are not barren, but procreative, and... the workers in poverty, are in spite of themselves, giving to the world a litter of miserables, whose degeneracy is so stubborn and fixed that reclamation is almost impossible, especially when the only process of reclamation must consist in trying to force the pauper, vagrant, and weakling back into that struggle with poverty which is all of the time defeating stronger and better natures than theirs.

Source: The Amber Spyglass

Preface
1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

Source: The Mephisto Club

1777
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Life of Johnson (Boswell)

Source: Sliver of Truth

A veces creo el mal es todo y que el bien es sólo un bello deseo del mal.
Voces (1943)

Source: All the Little Live Things

Principles of Legislation (1830), Ch. X : Analysis of Political Good and Evil; How they are spread in society
Context: It is with government, as with medicine. They have both but a choice of evils. Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils: In making this choice, what ought to be the object of the legislator? He ought to assure himself of two things; 1st, that in every case, the incidents which he tries to prevent are really evils; and 2ndly, that if evils, they are greater than those which he employs to prevent them.
There are then two things to be regarded; the evil of the offence and the evil of the law; the evil of the malady and the evil of the remedy.
An evil comes rarely alone. A lot of evil cannot well fall upon an individual without spreading itself about him, as about a common centre. In the course of its progress we see it take different shapes: we see evil of one kind issue from evil of another kind; evil proceed from good and good from evil. All these changes, it is important to know and to distinguish; in this, in fact, consists the essence of legislation.