Life & Wisdom Quote by Carolyn Wells

“Of two evils choose the prettier” flips a moral proverb into a social diagnostic. Wells takes the familiar counsel to pick the lesser evil and swaps “lesser” for “prettier,” exposing how often judgment is quietly aesthetic before it’s ethical. The line is a scalpel: it doesn’t argue that beauty is good, it admits that beauty is persuasive enough to launder what we already know is wrong.

The intent is lightly comic but not soft. Wells, writing in an era obsessed with manners, appearances, and the marketability of women, compresses a whole culture of veneer into seven words. “Prettier” isn’t just about faces; it’s packaging, polish, the version of harm that arrives with nice stationery and a charming smile. The subtext is bleak: if you’re trapped between evils, you’re not actually choosing virtue, you’re choosing the story you can live with. The prettier evil is the one that lets you keep your self-image intact.

What makes the quote work is its breezy cadence. It reads like advice from a witty aunt, which is precisely the trap: it mimics the tone of harmless guidance while smuggling in a critique of moral laziness. In modern terms, it’s a line about PR and vibes, about how “problematic” behavior gets tolerated when it’s delivered by someone charismatic, or how institutions commit the same abuses but the sleek one gets the benefit of the doubt. Wells isn’t endorsing the choice; she’s mocking the fact that we keep making it.