Many big thinkers believe that MOST evil comes from “good” / ordinary people.
Note: Please read our article “Are You Evil?” for a deeper look at the listed quotes below.
If you are one of those people who’s complaining about things being wrong or bad or needing to be changed, but you’re not doing anything about it, you’re kind of the problem.
— Danielle Gletow
[People fail] to realize… that subjective feelings are largely irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they are not transformed into action.
— Stanley Milgram
The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.
— Albert Einstein
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice…
— Martin Luther King Jr.
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
— Elie Weisel
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
— John Stuart Mill
The worst punishment isn’t waiting for those who committed to something and did wrong: the worst punishment is reserved for those who committed to nothing and stayed on the fence.
— Jordan Peterson
The opposite of a hero is not a villain; it’s a bystander.
— Matt Langdon
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception… [These tendencies are] basic but not inevitable.
— Ervin Staub
It was so-called “good” people and “normal” people and “nice” people that allowed the Holocaust to happen—and in many cases, even facilitated it. We must all realize… that it was people like us who murdered the Jews, and it is essential that we understand why that happened, and how that happened…
Not knowing history allows us to delude ourselves into thinking that we are good people who might have done great and courageous things had we been given the chance, while often avoiding any opportunity to do anything good or self-sacrificial now.
Often injustice lies in what you aren’t doing, not only in what you are doing.
— Marcus Aurelius
There is the moral dualism that sees good and evil as instincts within us between which we must choose. But there is also what I will call pathological dualism that sees humanity itself as radically… divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad. You are either one or the other.
— Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.
— Revelation 3:16