“If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.”
Source: White Oleander
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Janet Fitch 86
American writer 1955Related quotes

Memoirs (trans. Machen 1894), book 1, Preface http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/casanova/c33m/preface2.html
Referenced
Source: Geschichte Meines Lebens

“The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.”
29
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)
Context: The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.
The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.

"The Poison Cure", as translated by Gowri Ramnarayan in Kalki : Selected Stories (1999)

“Every artist writes his own autobiography.”
The New Spirit

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.

Source: Studies in Nature and Literature

“Every religion says war is evil, but one way or another they end up playing along.”
Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 14 (p. 164)

“Anger is the key to every evil.”
[Baqir Shareef al-Qurashi, Abdullah al-Shahin, The Life of Imam Hasan al-'Askari, Wonderful short maxims, 2005]
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