Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s simile flatters you with a comforting physics: evil isn’t a demonic mastermind, it’s a basic substance. It “abounds” and is “cheap” the way water is everywhere and costs nothing to draw. That first move is the sting. If evil is plentiful and low-effort, then virtue stops looking like a natural human default and starts looking like a deliberate, maintained system. You don’t have to invent cruelty; you just stop paying attention.

The middle clause, “soon fouls,” turns the metaphor domestic. Water goes bad when it’s stagnant, contaminated, left in the wrong vessel. Butler is smuggling in a theory of moral ecology: corruption thrives in neglected spaces, in institutions without circulation, in lives without accountability. Evil isn’t only an act; it’s what happens when conditions allow decay.

Then he swerves: “but runs itself clear of taint.” This is the unsettling part, because it suggests evil has a self-cleaning alibi. Like a stream that looks pure again a mile downstream, wrongdoing can wash off its own evidence. Time passes, attention moves on, perpetrators rebrand, the public forgets, the story gets rewritten as “complicated.” The harm remains, but the surface clarity returns quickly enough to tempt us into calling it resolved.

Context matters: Butler, a Victorian skeptic and satirist of respectable pieties, distrusted moral posturing. He’s warning that evil’s greatest advantage is not its power but its ordinariness and its ability to appear “clear” once it’s in motion. The line reads like a disinfectant for self-deception: don’t confuse cleanliness with innocence, and don’t confuse ubiquity with inevitability.