Charles Hodge Quotes

For the first time in history, the rational and the good are fully armed in the battle against evil. Here we finally find the answer to our paradox; now we can understand the nature of the social power held by evil. Ultimately, the evil, the irrational, truly has no power. The evil men’s control of morality is transient; it lives on borrowed time made possible only by the errors of the good. In time, as more honest men grasp the truth, evil’s stranglehold will be easily broken.

It is a law of our humanity, that man must know both good and evil; he must know good through evil. There never was a principle but what triumphed through much evil; no man ever progressed to greatness and goodness but through great mistakes.

Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. [...] Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it.

Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.

I see the triumph of good over evil as a manifestation of the error-correcting process of evolution.

The only way I know to drive out evil from the country is by the constructive method of filling it with good.

The relish of good and evil depends in a great measure upon the opinion we have of them.

It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

...but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes.

Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.

Every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from good and evil.

We best oppose error by promoting a solid knowledge of the word of truth, and the greatest kindness we can do to children, is to make them early to know the Bible.

In innocence there is no strength against evil, said Sparrowhawk, a little wryly. But there is strength in it for good.

. . .It is the Law that while Evil, unopposed, may accomplish terrible deeds, the power of Good can never be overthrown when opposed to Evil. . .

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel.

bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.

It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.

Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.

Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?

By giving too much importance to fine actions one may end by paying an indirect but powerful tribute to evil, because in so doing one implies that such fine actions are only valuable because they are rare, and that malice or indifference are far more common motives in the actions of men.

Good is to bee sought out, and evill attended.

If there was such evil in the world, was it possible that there was good, too?

Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth—no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant.