What's the difference between evil and harmful?

Evil


Definition:

  • (a.) Having qualities tending to injury and mischief; having a nature or properties which tend to badness; mischievous; not good; worthless or deleterious; poor; as, an evil beast; and evil plant; an evil crop.
  • (a.) Having or exhibiting bad moral qualities; morally corrupt; wicked; wrong; vicious; as, evil conduct, thoughts, heart, words, and the like.
  • (a.) Producing or threatening sorrow, distress, injury, or calamity; unpropitious; calamitous; as, evil tidings; evil arrows; evil days.
  • (n.) Anything which impairs the happiness of a being or deprives a being of any good; anything which causes suffering of any kind to sentient beings; injury; mischief; harm; -- opposed to good.
  • (n.) Moral badness, or the deviation of a moral being from the principles of virtue imposed by conscience, or by the will of the Supreme Being, or by the principles of a lawful human authority; disposition to do wrong; moral offence; wickedness; depravity.
  • (n.) malady or disease; especially in the phrase king's evil, the scrofula.
  • (adv.) In an evil manner; not well; ill; badly; unhappily; injuriously; unkindly.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) King Salman of Saudi Arabia urged the redoubling of efforts to “eradicate this dangerous scourge and rid the world of its evils”.
  • (2) More evil than Clocky , the alarm clock that rolls away when you reach out to silence it, or the Puzzle Alarm , which makes you complete a simple puzzle before it'll go quiet, the Money Shredding Alarm Clock methodically destroys your cash unless you rouse yourself.
  • (3) To confront this evil – and defeat it, standing together for our values, for our security, for our prosperity.” Merkel gave a strong endorsement of Cameron’s reform strategy, saying that Britain’s demands were “not just understandable, but worthy of support”.
  • (4) "Our black, Muslim and Jewish citizens will sleep much less easily now the BBC has legitimised the BNP by treating its racist poison as the views of just another mainstream political party when it is so uniquely evil and dangerous."
  • (5) Richard now is presented, albeit somewhat inconsistently, as evil in response to social ostracism because of his ugly deformities.
  • (6) One view of these results stems from the belief that contraception is a necessary evil and the pill is the closest to a 'natural' sex act.
  • (7) Answer, citing Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” This is a very British suicide.
  • (8) So that you know he's evil, he is dressed like a giant, bedraggled grey duckling, in a fur coat made up of bits of chewed-up wolf.
  • (9) How World of Warcraft train future soldiers One odder digression sees the two discussing whether or not MMORPGs, video games like World of Warcraft, are evil.
  • (10) The deputy prime minister branded the treatment meted out to the four-year-old by his mother, Magdelena Luczak, and stepfather, Mariusz Krezolek, as evil and vile, but suggested it was up to the whole of society to stop such tragedies.
  • (11) We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil.
  • (12) Questioned as to whether Google needs to alter its mission statement, which was twinned with the company mantra “don’t be evil, for the next stage of company growth in an interview with the Financial Times , Page responded: “We’re in a bit of uncharted territory.
  • (13) "I have been an evil witch, but now I can set light to the house and die happy."
  • (14) But at some point I realized that it's precisely because they continuously justify so much violence and aggression from their side that they have such a boundless compulsion to depict others as the Uniquely Primitive and Violent Evil.
  • (15) For here we see the depravity to which man can sink, the barbarity that unfolds when we begin to see our fellow human beings as somehow less than us, less worthy of dignity and life; we see how evil can, for a moment in time, triumph when good people do nothing."
  • (16) The US said it had removed North Korea – once a member of George Bush's axis of evil – from the terror list to breathe life into the stalled nuclear negotiations and would continue to pressure Pyongyang to resolve the abduction issue.
  • (17) As he described, with something approaching relish, the horrifying effect of a desperate eurozone willing to destroy the British economy, our industry and our society, purely to protect itself, I was reminded of the epic Last Judgement by John Martin, now in the Tate, which depicts the terrifying chaos as the good are separated from the evil damned.
  • (18) Channel One also branded Berezovsky an "evil genius," and a report on his demise quoted a senior member of the ruling United Russia , Vyacheslav Nikonov, saying he found it hard to believe the news was true.
  • (19) In recent months there have been series of protests against the intensifying campaign, with one Catholic leader denouncing the cross removals as an “evil act” .
  • (20) Time and again they said to me: ‘I knew I shouldn’t, but I had to weigh it up against what was happening, and it was the lesser of two evils.’ Years later many of these women are still ashamed of themselves.

Harmful


Definition:

  • (a.) Full of harm; injurious; hurtful; mischievous.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Chapman and the other "illegals" – sleeper agents without diplomatic cover – seem to have done little to harm American national security.
  • (2) Bacterial lipopolysaccharides (LPS), which are important components of the cell wall of gram-negative bacteria, induce a number of host responses both beneficial and harmful.
  • (3) Robert Francis QC's official report in February on the Mid Staffordshire care scandal, in which an estimated 400 to 1,200 patients died unnecessarily at Stafford hospital between 2005 and 2008, called for the NHS to make "zero harm" its objective.
  • (4) I realise now that the drug is far less harmful then I believed at the time.
  • (5) Irrespective of method, the suicide attempt was predominantly a psychotic act of young single people with chronic, severe disorders and considerable past parasuicide, in a setting of escalating self-harm.
  • (6) Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, People's Liberation Army's chief of the general staff Gen Fang Fenghui also warned that the US must be objective about tensions between China and Vietnam or risk harming relations between Washington and Beijing.
  • (7) Jails and prison populations are unique in the incidence of deliberate self-harm, but the phenomenon is not well understood.
  • (8) It’s been widely reported that black people are disproportionately harmed by the mortgage market.
  • (9) Repeat patients were more likely to threaten to harm others, have a diagnosis of adjustment disorder, conduct or oppositional disorder and be under the care of a child welfare agency.
  • (10) Considerations of different ways of obtaining informed consent, determining ways of minimizing harm, and justifications for violating the therapeutic obligation are discussed but found unsatisfactory in many respects.
  • (11) Judge John Burgess told the men that their intention was “to do great harm in a peaceful community”.
  • (12) Lack of transparency about the nature of the relationship between police and media also led to speculation and perceptions, whatever the facts, that caused "serious harm".
  • (13) The problem of the achondroplast arises when his surroundings, right from the start, reject his disorder, connoting it with destructive anxiety: this seriously harms the subject's physical image, making him an outcast.
  • (14) Religious efforts to address the issue have also been complicit in absolving men of their crimes, objectifying women and doing more harm than good with campaigns that blame women for the phenomenon.
  • (15) Both the observance of occupational limit-values for dusts and other harmful materials at the work place, which have effects on the respiration system, and the medical survey of workers with the use of special methods for examination of respiratory system are necessary.
  • (16) Changes in the fitness of harmful mutations may therefore impose a greater long-term disadvantage on asexual populations than those which are sexual.
  • (17) The possibility of being liable if an incompetent student becomes registered and causes harm is also discussed.
  • (18) Butler was convicted of grevious bodily harm and child cruelty, and sentenced to prison.
  • (19) Was the Dalkon Shield so harmful in the nulliparous woman?
  • (20) Education can increase compliance and sometimes modify harmful behavior.