quote · Legacy record
Evil is thus a kind of parasite on goodness. If there were no good by which to measure things, evil could not exist. Men sometimes forget this, and say, there is so much evil in the world that there cannot be a God. They are forgetting that, if there were no God, they would have no way of distinguishing evil from goodness. The very concept of evil admits and recognizes a Standard, a Whole, a Rule, an Order. Nobody would say that his automobile was out of order if he did not have a conception of how an automobile ought to run.
Evil is thus a kind of parasite on goodness. If there were no good by which to measure things, evil could not exist. Men sometimes forget this, and say, there is so much evil in the world that there cannot be a God. They are forgetting that, if there were no God, they would have no way of distinguishing evil from goodness. The very concept of evil admits and recognizes a Standard, a Whole, a Rule, an Order. Nobody would say that his automobile was out of order if he did not have a conception of how an automobile ought to run.
Approximate author period: c. 1937 AD · modern
Meaning not yet available
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- Author or tradition
- Fulton J. Sheen
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
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- Approximate author period: c. 1937 AD · modern
Approximate author-period anchor from life dates 1895 to 1979; Wikidata Q954398, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q954398 (accessed 2026-10-08). Not a quotation composition date.
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Supplied reference C; CSV row 231288; supplied attribution, independently unverified
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