evil [OE] Like *good and *bad, evil goes back to the earliest times, and many have reflected on its nature over the centuries. ‘The evil that men do lives after them’, wrote Shakespeare in Julius Caesar. The proverb See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is often represented by the image of ‘three wise monkeys’, who are pictured covering their eyes, ears, and mouth with their hands. The carving of the original monkeys is found on a 17th-century shrine at Nikko in Japan. The idea of a necessary evil goes back to Greek. The first necessary evil was marriage, and the first example in English, from 1547, refers to a woman. In his State of the Union address of February 2002, US President George W. Bush said of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that they constituted ‘an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of this world’.