Daily Inspiration Quote by Aristotle

Evil, Aristotle implies, is rarely an event. Its most effective disguise is scale: small enough to be tolerated, familiar enough to be filed under "how things are". The line works because it indicts perception, not just morality. We don’t ignore harm only because we’re wicked or indifferent; we ignore it because it’s incremental, embedded in routine, diluted by plausible excuses. A petty injustice can pass as a misunderstanding. A small cruelty can be rebranded as discipline. The eye, Aristotle suggests, is a lazy judge until the evidence becomes unmistakable.

The subtext is politically sharp. In a polis, the early stages of corruption or social decay are easy to rationalize: one exception to the rule, one official cutting a corner, one group quietly excluded. Nothing looks like a crisis until the accumulations form a pattern too obvious to deny. Aristotle is writing in a world where ethics is not private self-help but civic architecture; character, habit, and law knit together. His broader project in the Nicomachean Ethics is about habituation: virtues and vices are built through repeated acts. This aphorism flips that idea into a warning. If vice is practiced in small doses, it becomes invisible - then inevitable.

It’s also a critique of our appetite for spectacle. We notice evil when it becomes legible as drama, when it “strikes the eye,” not when it quietly rearranges what people can expect from one another. Aristotle’s point lands today because it doesn’t flatter the reader: the problem isn’t just evil’s growth. It’s our threshold for seeing it.