Evil Quotes

The unknown characters of writing seem to be endowed with an evil of life of their own as though sentient, and fain would wrest themselves forth from the parchment and wreak mischief on whomsoever gazes upon them.

~ E. Hoffmann Price

Reforms will come as all great reforms have always come in ridding us of evils against both man and animal--not as we change our moral principles but as we discern and accept the implications of principles already held.

~ Matthew Scully

More than once have I thought, Why does crime, even when as powerful as Cæsar, and assured of being beyond punishment, strive always for the appearances of truth, justice, and virtue? Why does it take the trouble? I consider that to murder a brother, a mother, a wife, is a thing worthy of some petty Asiatic king, not a Roman Cæsar; but if that position were mine, I should not write justifying letters to the Senate. But Nero writes. Nero is looking for appearances, for Nero is a coward. But Tiberius was not a coward; still he justified every step he took. Why is this? What a marvellous, involuntary homage paid to virtue by evil! And knowest thou what strikes me? This, that it is done because transgression is ugly and virtue is beautiful. Therefore a man of genuine æsthetic feeling is also a virtuous man. Hence I am virtuous.

~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

Because When you write about people, you inevitably offend--but if you write about animals, the evil do not recognize themselves but the good understand immediately.

~ Erica Jong

When a person denies his conscience for too long, it can become seared. That person becomes susceptible to receiving and accepting all sorts of harmful and evil things. This is true for both believers and unbelievers. A seared conscience will open a person up to demonic spirits and activities.

~ Henry Hon

The one who runs from his shadows sleeps with the devil at night.

~ Robin Sacredfire

For every thinking and reflecting man the existence of evil is a riddle he cannot escape.

~ François Petit

we could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart

~ Richard Preston

Do not be devilish.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

[She] sees. She knows. She understands. About evil, or whatever you care to name it. It comes. It's relentless. It doesn't care if you forgot it. It searches, and it finds you, and it arrives on your doorstep one day, and it lights up a screen, it calls you by your real name, it smiles at you, it says hello, it eyes your son and promises to take him home.

~ Adam Sternbergh

There once was a kindly farmer who found a viper freezing on the ground in the snow. Please help me, the poor creature said, for I am too cold to live. The farmer took the viper and put it inside of his shirt, and the viper began to warm itself and come alive again. But upon coming alive, it bit the farmer most wretchedly, and as the farmer died, he asked the viper, but why? Why when I was so trusting of you?Because I am a viper, the snake replied. And one cannot expect kindness from evil.

~ Rachel Caine

This secular Leftist denial of human free will is one of the reasons the Left recoils from labeling evil as evil, and (correctly) ascribes talk about good and evil to the religious.

~ Dennis Prager

Good always has a price, Marcus. Evil comes free.

~ Donato Carrisi

Reject evil. Choose the good.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

As long as you remember that fighting evil doesn't necessarily make you good! Good and evil are each other's enemies, but they are often found close together.

~ Tonke Dragt

Man is the bridge of good as much as evil. He hurts and he loves. He divides and he unites. He destroys and he rebuilds. He kills and he saves lives. Yet, he denies or pretends that he does not know the other side of him. He only knows of himself as the protagonist, the righteous, and the honorable one. Others, who do not belong to his fold, are the villains, the devils, and the low-life beings. Ironically, the less he knows of his other self the more he becomes what he derides and denigrates. He is the tragic paradox of what he claims to be despite the evidence of his action that proves otherwise. (Danny Castillones Sillada, Man: The Paragon of All Paradoxes)

~ Danny Castillones Sillada

evil is, after all, only a deficiency of goodness.

~ Dorothy Gilman

That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else.

~ Charlie Jane Anders

The human beings must be mentally immensely strong, during the encounter with the true malevolence in others, because on it's own it doesn't belong to their species.

~ Mladen Đorđević

...if we are to become a land of homes and people, evil men must not be allowed to persist in their evil.

~ Louis L'amour

The world won't be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

~ Albert Einstein

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.

~ Hannah Arendt

To be a pacifist in the face of evil is to be complicit with evil.

~ J.adam Snyder

When he admires the man he calls his father: a man slightly above the scum of the earth—what does that speak about he who admires him?

~ Terry A O'neal

What you must first understand is the very nature of the Verity. Humans have a tendency for darkness and light. To choose good or evil. But no such mixture exists for the Verity or the Void. The Void houses no light. The Verity embraces no darkness. So when the Verity seeks a new vessel, it always searches out the purest heart--the person least likely to be swayed by darkness. A heart so true has the capacity to love like no other. And a love like that? It changes a person.

~ Sara Ella

Those who apparently do evil do it ultimately out of love, even if their actions are misguided for the moment.

~ Shepherd Hoodwin

He looked like an evil male model, showing off what the fashionable college-age villain was wearing to Harvard this year.

~ Rick Riordan

I am determined that never, if I can help it,Shall evil triumph over good. - Creon

~ Sophocles

There is always going to be evil as long as goodness lives on.

~ K. Weikel

It’s a cruel joke of the universe that the one person who makes me come alive is himself dead. And evil. His very existence defies all moral laws and all known laws of physics.

~ Kitty Thomas

This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Evil is anything that goes against life, harms life, stifles life, destroys life. Evil is bringing harm to another person, inflicting unnecessary pain, suffering, or confusion. All evil comes from this. This is the root of all evil.

~ Anne Rice

Evil isn't born, Dearie. It's made.

~ Rumplestiltskin

He was in conflict with himself. There was no enjoyment in the thought that he had escaped a great danger, and in the midst of his uneasy reflections he had a sudden breathless conviction that she made him feel old because he loved her. Then he felt a hatred of himself, gathering into one mighty heap all the fierce and bitter hatred he had cherished for others and pouring it out on himself.

~ Norbert Jacques

Don't make a deal with the devil.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I don't believe in raw evil. Noah said, It doesn't care if you believe in it

~ Maggie Stiefvater

Psychology’s service to U.S. national security has produced a variant of what the psychiatrist Robert Lifton has called, in his study of Nazi doctors, a “Faustian bargain.” In this case, the price paid has been the American Psychological Association’s collective silence, ethical “numbing,” and, over time, historical amnesia. 3 Indeed, Lifton emphasizes that “the Nazis were not the only ones to involve doctors in evil”; in defense of this argument, he cites the Cold War “role of …American physicians and psychologists employed by the Central Intelligence Agency…for unethical medical and psychological experiments involving drugs and mind manipulation.” 4

~ Alfred W. Mccoy

I consider Yoda to be just about the most evil character that I’ve ever seen in the history of literature. I have gotten people into tongue-tied snits unable to name for me one scene in which Yoda is ever helpful to anybody, or says anything that’s genuinely wise. 'Do or do not, there is no try.' Up yours, you horrible little oven mitt! 'Try' is how human beings get better. That’s how people learn, they try some of their muscles, or their Force mechanism heads in the right direction, that part gets reinforced and rewarded with positive feedback, which you never give. And parts of it get repressed by saying, 'No, that you will not do!' It is abhorrent, junior high school Zen. It’s cartoon crap.

~ David Brin

It seems to me that evil is a kind of ultimate greed, a greed that is so all-encompassing that it can't ever see anything lovely, rare, or precious without wanting to possess it. A greed so total that if it can't possess these things, it will destroy them rather than chance that someone else might have them. And a greed so intense that even having these things never causes it to lessen one iota -- the lovely, the rare and the precious never affect it except to make it want them.

~ Mercedes Lackey

This is what evil does; it makes choices for others in the name of religion, in the name of government, in the name of community, in the name of personal gain, that these individuals are best able to make for themselves.

~ John Kramer