Life & Wisdom Quote by Sophocles

A line like this only lands because it refuses the comforting fantasy that bad means can be rinsed clean by good intentions. Sophocles frames wrongdoing as contagion: once a man decides the cure can be another poison, the sickness spreads through everything he touches. The phrasing is totalizing - "all a man's affairs" - suggesting corruption is not a contained compromise but a systemic condition. You do one ugly thing for a supposedly righteous end, and soon every decision starts speaking that language.

The subtext is political as much as personal. Sophocles wrote for a civic audience that watched power up close: democratic Athens, imperial ambitions, public trials, the constant temptation to meet violence with violence and call it necessity. Greek tragedy is crowded with characters who try to outsmart fate through expedient harm - coercion, revenge, deceit - and end up amplifying the very disaster they meant to avert. The warning isn't pious; it's practical. When you adopt an "evil" tool, you train your mind to justify it, then to repeat it, then to need it.

There's also a quiet rebuke to the heroic self-image. "He wishes to cure" implies the speaker recognizes the pose: the reformer, the avenger, the decisive leader. Sophocles punctures that posture by insisting that moral shortcuts don't save time; they reroute the whole journey into rot. The tragedy isn't just that evil fails. It's that it succeeds in changing the person who tries to wield it.