“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, The Gulag Archipelago
-see possible implications of this here
“Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer its necessary steadfastness and determination… That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
“Indeed, the contradiction inherent in all evil is that it originates in the desire to eliminate evil.” – James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
“one always pays dearly and terribly when religions do not want to be a means of education and cultivation in the philosopher’s hand but insist on having their own sovereign way, when they themselves want to be ultimate ends and means among other means.” – Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 61
“We have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.” – Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning
It is easy for us to disregard evil as that which we should avoid. Or the opposite of what we want to bring about. However something so pervasive is never so easily surmised.
Best explorations
-Ryan; 4/17/2020
Thoughts, Comments, & Observations 