Evil Quotes

Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth… Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.

~ Antonio Negri

Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,Few come within the compass of my curse,—Wherein I did not some notorious ill,As kill a man, or else devise his death,Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,Set deadly enmity between two friends,Make poor men's cattle break their necks;Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,And bid the owners quench them with their tears.Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful thingsAs willingly as one would kill a fly,And nothing grieves me heartily indeedBut that I cannot do ten thousand more.

~ William Shakespeare

when traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility-lest we prefer instead to wallow in a perennial state of powerless, frustrated, furious, victimhood. For what one possesses the power to bring about, one has also the power to limit, mitigate, counteract, or transmute.

~ Stephen A. Diamond

There's never been an act done since the beginning, from a kid stealing candy to a dictator committing genocide, that the person doing it didn't think he was fully justified. That's a mental trick called rationalizing, and it's done the human race more harm than anything else you can name.

~ Leigh Brackett

By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange - meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.

~ Anthony Burgess

I cannot think why we should be astonished at all the evils which exist in the Church, when those who ought to be models on which all may pattern their virtues are annulling the work wrought in the religious Orders by the spirit of the saints of old.

~ Teresa Of Ávila

So revenge is obviously a deeply messed-up expression of vindictiveness. It is hard to even call it evil. It is just plain insanity. A result of deeply messed-up thinking.

~ Venkatesh G. Rao

Evil cannot and will not be vanquished by evil. Dark will only swallow dark and deepen. The good and the light are the keenest weapons.

~ Nora Roberts

Evil was coming. I wondered whose face it would be wearing.

~ Dean Koontz

They were handsome, proper and normal family fathers who built the concentration camps and whipped the prisoners to death. And who was Nietzsche? A narcotized syphilitic.

~ Jens Bjørneboe

Hell is the impossibility of reason.

~ Oliver Stone

Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.

~ Keith Haring

Evil is a point of view ... God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately ... for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves.God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are none so like him as ourselves.

~ Anne Rice

The symbol of a drama, a symphony, or a dance is useful to correct a certain absurdity which may arise if we talk too much of God planning and creating the world for good and then being frustrated by the free will of the creatures. This may raise the ridiculous idea that the Fall to God by surprise and upset His plan, or else – more ridiculous still – that God planned the whole thing for conditions which, He well knew, were never going to be realized. In fact, of course, God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebulae. The world is a dance in which good, descending from God, is disturbed by evil arising from the creatures, and the resulting conflict is resolved by God's own assumption of the suffering nature which evil produces.

~ C.s. Lewis

The problem with evil people is that they can see only evil in others. It is one of the worst curses of being evil, that you can no longer experience good.

~ Michael Gruber

The problem with evil people is that they can see only evil in others. It is one of the worst curses of being evil, that you can no longer experience good.

~ Michael Gruber

Like sin itself, Satan appeals to the senses. He originated and perfected the art of disguising evil as good.

~ Charles R. Swindoll

Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.

~ William Beveridge

The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. By fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess. When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way life has to be. You cease to marvel at just how much evil man con conjure by existing.

~ Glen Cook

What is discovered may be abused, but that does not mean the discovery was evil.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

Love permeates all and energizes life.Even evil has love. If not, she is dead.

~ Toba Beta

We've heard them all talk about Dust, and they're so afraid of it, and you know what? We believed them, even though we could see that what they were doing was wicked and evil and wrong... We thought Dust must be bad too, because they were grown up and they said so. But what if it isn't? What if it's—'She said breathlessly, 'Yeah! What if it's really good...

~ Philip Pullman

you are good when you strive to give of yourself.

~ Kahlil Gibran

It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.

~ Peter Kreeft

Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

~ Theodor W. Adorno

Bluebell had been saying that he knew the men hated us for raiding their crops and gardens, and Toadflax answered, 'That wasn't why they destroyed the warren. It was just because we were in their way. They killed us to suit themselves.

~ Richard Adams

George Bush made a mistake when he referred to the Saddam Hussein regime as 'evil.' Every liberal and leftist knows how to titter at such black-and-white moral absolutism. What the president should have done, in the unlikely event that he wanted the support of America's peace-mongers, was to describe a confrontation with Saddam as the 'lesser evil.' This is a term the Left can appreciate. Indeed, 'lesser evil' is part of the essential tactical rhetoric of today's Left, and has been deployed to excuse or overlook the sins of liberal Democrats, from President Clinton's bombing of Sudan to Madeleine Albright's veto of an international rescue for Rwanda when she was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Among those longing for nuance, moral relativism—the willingness to use the term evil, when combined with a willingness to make accommodations with it—is the smart thing: so much more sophisticated than 'cowboy' language.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Very well. He'd lighten up. As a matter of fact, he felt as light as the bubbly froth that flew from the lips of the waves. Whatever else his long, unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun! If others should find that appraisal shallow, frivolous, so be it. To him, it seemed now to largely have been some form of play. And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play--more than piety, more than charity or vigilance--was what allowed human beings to transcend evil.

~ Tom Robbins

Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.

~ Ervin Staub

It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.

~ Gregory Maguire

...it is in the very fundamentals of evil that one always condemns it when they see it but rationalizes it when they do it.

~ Jack L. Chalker

The sole social evil is darkness; humanity is identity, for all men are made of the same clay.

~ Victor Hugo

In account after account of exorcisms the demonic voices will propound nihilism of one variety or another.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

The nose can’t help catchin’ what the ears get sick with. Yessir, rock bands just sweat evil. Evil’s been around for a long time, ever since rocks started getting real hot and making a lot of noise as they exploded out o’ the ground and evil spirits wisped out of hell. If a band ever uses a fog machine, hold your breath so you don’t become possessed by one.

~ M.c. Humphreys

Her name was Mora ... and she was waiting.

~ M.l. Legette

Evil is also not anything small or close to home, and not the worst; otherwise one could grow accustomed to it.

~ Jacob Grimm

[T]he scale of a man's evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them.

~ Theodore Dalrymple

Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil but then also do no evil.

~ Amit Abraham

...That insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson