All evils are equal when they are extreme.

The line suggests that once suffering or wrongdoing reaches an extreme, distinctions of degree lose practical meaning: the experience becomes uniformly intolerable. It implies a moral and psychological leveling—catastrophes may differ in kind, but at the limit they converge in their capacity to overwhelm judgment, choice, and endurance. Read this way, the aphorism cautions against complacent comparisons (“this evil is less than that one”) when circumstances have crossed a threshold where any option is ruinous. It can also be taken as a tragic insight: in extremity, human beings may be forced into decisions where every path carries grave harm, and the usual calculus of lesser evils collapses.