So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.
ATTRIBUTION:
T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot (1888–1965), Anglo-American poet, critic. repr. In Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (1975). “Baudelaire,” introduction, The Intimate Journals of Charles Baudelaire, trans. by Christopher Isherwood (1930).
