Fight the evil within. Marcus Aurelius 6.41

Marcus Aurelius consistently thinks that good and evil properly belong to the private life, rather than the public one. By his reckoning, hatred and love are best expressed in the confines of my own mind, as I reject and accept attitudes over which I have personal and wilful control. Public life will demand actions and attitudes from me, of course, but these are not the same, not as morally sound, as the actions and attitudes that I culture and keep within myself. Blaming the evil of the world rather than my own evil is a cause of useless blasphemy and misanthropy: instead of making evil an occasion for learning to express better the good that I carry inside, I learn to turn it into hatred of the gods and my fellow men. A bad outcome, as it tends to render me miserable and useless, to myself as well as others.

Ὅ τι ἂν τῶν ἀπροαιρέτων ὑποστήσῃ σαυτῷ ἀγαθὸν ἢ κακόν, ἀνάγκη κατὰ τὴν περίπτωσιν τοῦ τοιούτου κακοῦ ἢ τὴν ἀπότευξιν τοῦ τοιούτου ἀγαθοῦ μέμψασθαί σε θεοῖς καὶ ἀνθρώπους δὲ μισῆσαι τοὺς αἰτίους ὄντας ἢ ὑποπτευομένους ἔσεσθαι τῆς ἀποτεύξεως ἢ τῆς περιπτώσεως· καὶ ἀδικοῦμεν δὴ πολλὰ διὰ τὴν πρὸς ταῦτα διαφοράν. ἐὰν δὲ μόνα τὰ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν ἀγαθὰ καὶ κακὰ κρίνωμεν, οὐδεμία αἰτία καταλείπεται οὔτε θεῷ ἐγκαλέσαι οὔτε πρὸς ἄνθρωπον στῆναι στάσιν πολεμίου.

Whenever you perceive yourself experiencing good or evil that you have not chosen, necessity obliges you to blame the gods for your encounter with evil, or for the failure of an accidental good, and to hate the human beings who are—or at least appear to be—immediately responsible for these outcomes. We do much injustice because of this disposition toward things. If we were to reserve our judgment of good and evil strictly for things that lie within our own power, we would have no cause to indict the gods or declare war on humanity.