T. S. Eliot Quotes

In order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. 'Tis a necessary evil.

We must believe in free will, we have no choice.

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

If God were to remove all evil from our world (but somehow leave human beings on the planet), it would mean that the essence of 'humanness' would be destroyed. We would become robots.

Humanity is to be met with in a den of robbers.

Humanity, perhaps, that quality of benevolence that humans have, without irony, named after themselves.

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

We say we embrace humanity, but what does that mean? We are all defined by our limits, so to what extent can we embrace all this? Because we all contain within ourselves equally the capacity for kindness, as much as for cruelty or evil. And the best of us are able to suppress those baser impulses, instincts. That's the war within.

I'm not interested in a good man's life. I'm interested in contradiction.

Why should anybody want to save the human race, or damn it either? Does God want its society? Does Satan?

Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and historical tasks is an actual or potential assassin.

So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.

For what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?

I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

This World will always continue to be a mixture of Good and Evil. Our duty is to sympathize with the weak and to Love even the wrongdoer.

We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.

Human beings are the only creatures on earth that claim a God and the only thing that behaves like it hasn't got one.

There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.

Kill a man who needs killing, and sometimes others pay for it. The question is, was it worth doing it anyway? There's always a balance, you know. Good and evil. Light and Shadow. We would not be human if there wasn't a balance.

I am a misanthrope yet utterly benevolent.

Thousands of years ago the question was asked: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.

"I love mankind," he said, "but I find to my amazement that the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in particular."

The world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil is the yin and yang of the human condition.