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We had better dispense with the personification of evil, because it leads, all too easily, to the most dangerous kind of war: religious war.

Religion as a human phenomenon is as riddled through with potential for both good and evil as any other phenomenon.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

If religion cannot restrain evil, it cannot claim effective power for good.

In some ways, evil is backhanded proof of Gods existence.

Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but insofar as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious.

In course of time, religion came with its rites invoking the aid of good spirits which were even more powerful than the bad spirits, and thus for the time being tempered the agony of fears.

There's too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.

Into every soul, however purged and fenced, evil appears to have as much freedom of entrance as God Himself.

People don't necessarily do evil deeds because they want to; people happen to do something with horrible consequences even if they meant to be kind.