Original: (la) Nullum malum bona intentione factum excusatur.
Variant: Variant translation: An evil action cannot be justified by reference to a good intention.
Source: On the Ten Commandments (c. 1273)
“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
“Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.”
Quoted in: Fayek S. Hourani (2012) Daily Bread for Your Mind and Soul, p. 336.
From Zoran Djindjic's speech held to students of Banja Luka University, 20.02.2003.
Case of John Lambert and others (1793), 22 How. St. Tr. 1018.
“Don't ascribe to evil what can be attributed to well-intentioned stupidity.”
Source: The Shadow Dragons
Act 3, sc. 4
The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)
1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)
Context: Suddenly, however, remedies for something called 'racism' became the order of the day. The word itself, like 'sexism', is of recent coinage and will not be found in any older dictionaries. The civil rights movement, premised upon individual rights, suddenly became the black power movement, premised upon group rights. 'Affirmative action' became a euphemism for the baldest kind of racial discrimination. That whites had long enjoyed preference over blacks was now taken to be a justification for blacks having preference over whites. What was lost sight of was that the evil of the past, whether of slavery or of Jim Crow, was evil not because it was done by whites to blacks, but because it was done by some human beings to other human beings. The purpose of the law was to end evil acts, not continue them in the guise of 'affirmative action'.
