209 Evil Quotes

A callous disregard for the claims of innocent human life is the heart and soul of the evil of terrorism.

Lucifer also has died with God, and from his ashes has arisen a spiteful demon who does not even understand the object of his venture.

People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.

When are we going to stop making excuses for the terrorists and saying that somebody is making them do it? No, these are simply evil people who want to kill.

Whoever originated the cliche that money is the root of all evil knew hardly anything about the nature of evil and very little about human beings.

The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil. The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master's whiplash.

There can be knowledge of the diabolical, but no belief in it, for more of the diabolical than there is does not exist.

We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.

Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat.

My success and my misfortunes, the bright and the dark days I have gone through, everything has proved to me that in this world, either physical or moral, good comes out of evil just as well as evil comes out of good.

Even in art, there is no light without shadows, and no shadows are cast without some light. Even the shadow of Adolf Hitler is accompanied by some light.

Imagine that leader of all the enemy, in that great plain of Babylon, sitting on a sort of throne of smoking flame, a horrible and terrifying sight. Watch him calling together countless devils, to despatch them into different cities till the whole world is covered, forgetting no province or locality, no class or single individual.

It seems we are capable of immense love and loyalty, and as capable of deceit and atrocity. It's probably this shocking ambivalence that makes us unique.

How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man.

There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.

Nothing helps you sleep at night so much as being absolutely certain that you're right, and everyone else is evil.

No evil can result from its inhibition more pernicious than its toleration.

The evils which sapped the nation's strength had all been wrought in the name of religion.

Alas for him who seeks salvation in good only! Balanced on God's strong shoulders, Good and Evil flap together like two mighty wings and lift him high.

It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.

It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead.

All things may corrupt when minds are prone to evil.

Submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you.

God is not the author of all things, but of good only.

Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.

The question why there is evil in existence is the same as why there is imperfection... But this is the real question we ought to ask: Is this imperfection the final truth, is evil absolute and ultimate?

Truth cannot afford to be tolerant where it faces positive evil.

The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.

The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.)

Every action that helps us manifest our divine nature more and more is good; every action that retards it is evil.

The judge should not be young; he should have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the nature of evil in others: knowledge should be his guide, not personal experience.

There are evils, as someone has pointed out, that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever - money, for instance, or war.

If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

In the beginning there were two primal spirits, Twins spontaneously active, These are the Good and the Evil, in thought, and in word, and in deed.

Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil think of things good folks can't think of. Can't enter your head what evil do

Good people can't out-think evil, cause evil thinks of things good folks can't think of. -Homebody

It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead. -Stone Tables

Try explaining Hitler to a kid.

One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand. But its culpability must still be understood... In more ingenuous times, when the tyrant razed cities for his own greater glory, when the slave chained to the conqueror's chariot was dragged through the rejoicing streets, when enemies were thrown to the wild beasts in front of the assembled people, the mind did not reel before such unabashed crimes, and the judgment remained unclouded. But slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judgment. On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence - through a curious transposition peculiar to our times - it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself.

I believe there is no devil but fear.

Tous maux sont pareils alors qu'ils sont extremes.

The last speech [Iago's soliloquy], the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity - how awful!

But he who dares to use the word 'God' for such devilish activity blasphemes against Providence and, according to our belief, he cannot end except in destruction.

Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie. When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan. His mouth is the foul-smelling maw of Hell, and his might is at bottom accursed. True, we must conduct a struggle against the National Socialist terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war.

If all Hitler had done was kill people in vast numbers more efficiently than anyone else ever did, the debate over his lasting importance might end there. But Hitler's impact went beyond his willingness to kill without mercy. He did something civilization had not seen before. Genghis Khan operated in the context of the nomadic steppe, where pillaging villages was the norm. Hitler came out of the most civilized society on Earth, the land of Beethoven and Goethe and Schiller. He set out to kill people not for what they did but for who they were. Even Mao and Stalin were killing their 'class enemies.' Hitler killed a million Jewish babies just for existing.

Before Hitler, we thought we had sounded the depths of human nature. He showed how much lower we could go, and that's what was so horrifying. It gets us wondering not just at the depths he showed us but whether there is worse to come.

For twenty centuries the sum total of evil has not diminished in the world.

Evil is the absence of God.

His work teaches us a lot about how to fight evil.

Baldur von Schirach was guilty of far more than war crimes. His was the deadly evil of corrupting the young. He poisoned the minds of an entire German generation. He trained and schooled the SS men, the men of the gas vans, the men of Oswiecim and Maidanek.

I see with sympathy The swollen veins on his brow, showing How exhausting it is to be evil.

Mankind: 'In all known time there has never been a greater monster or miracle than the human being.'

Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalite; le bien est toujours le produit d'un art.

Il y a dans tout homme, a toute heure, deux postulations simultanees, l'une vers Dieu, l'autre vers Satan.

:You got me in a vendetta kinda mood. You tell the angels in heaven you've never seen an evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you.

Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates - the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.

Can he safely be categorized either as an 'unhealthy' and 'abnormal' individual or as the characteristic product of German society, a phenomenon so distant from the 'solid American citizen' that he need be of no concern except as a historical or medical curiosity? Or must one go to the other extreme and search for 'banal evil-doers' under every bed? I hope that a 'humanization' of this callous creature of the Nazi system will, if not provide answers, at least provoke more thought on these questions.

Speak the truth and shame the Devil.

Therfore bihoveth hire a ful long spoon That shal ete with a feend.

Of all the plots and conspiracies that ever entered into the mind of man, the Gunpowder plot stands pre-eminent in horror and wickedness. The singular perseverance of the conspirators is shown by the fact, that so early as in Lent of the year 1603, Robert Catesby, who appears to have been the prime mover of the plot, in a conversation with Thomas Wintour and John Wright, first broke with them about a design for delivering England from her bondage, and to replant the Catholic religion.

This war would be only a partial success if the whole lot of Jewry survived it, while we shed our best blood to save Europe. My attitude toward the Jews will therefore be based solely on the expectation that they must disappear. They must be done away with. Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible.

So if depite that, Hitler prepared war, he perpetrated the greatest lie and betrayal in the world. This trial clearly shows that Hitler did just that. I have no hesitation to state very clearly that Hitler was a liar and a betrayer on a mammoth scale. Even without the death of the 5 million extermination camp victims, Hitler would still go down in history as the greatest villain that ever lived.

In my eyes, Himmler was worse than Hitler. The assassination attempt should have been directed against Himmler in the first place.

'The devil's everywhere,' he said. 'Not just at Brunswick one day and somewhere else the next. He's everywhere.'

Billy's agony, mainly proceeding from a generous young heart's virgin experience of the diabolical incarnate and effective in some men-the tension of that agony was over now.

Le mal n'est peut-etre qu'un violent plaisir. Qui pourrait determiner le point ou la volupte devient un mal et celui ou le mal est encore la volupte ? Les plus vives lumieres du monde ideal ne caressent-elles pas la vue, tandis que les plus douces tenebres du monde physique la blessent toujours.

Last night I had looked into the heart of darkness, and the sight had terrified me. What part should I play in the great purification? Most likely that of the Biblical scapegoat.

Then lies him down the lubber fiend, And stretched out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength.

I think the twentieth century should have taught us how 'civilisation' is the thinnest of veneers. I was reading something last year where a state torturer said it would only take him about two weeks to 'train' any one of us to willingly do the same job.

Then devil is with us, and together we will win.

At the foot of the Cross on Calvary Three soldiers sat and diced, And one of them was the Devil And he won the Robe of Christ.

'That was the strength of the Nazis,' she said. 'They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make him stay away.'

Guard thee from the power of evil; Who cannot trust, vows to the devil.

Of all the creatures that were made he [man] is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one - the solitary one - that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices - the most hateful...He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain...Also - in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.

In short, every beast hath some evil properties; but Cromwell hath the properties of all evil beasts.

So if the evil he had done wasn't the death of the roaches, what was it? The power he had? His knack for making things go just where he wanted, making them break just in the right place, understanding how things ought to be and helping them get that way?

Even the devil gives some justice to his victims, when they're beyond all help.

This much is certain, that Jesus Christ represents God as the fountain of all goodness, the eternal enemy of pain and evil, the uniform and unchanging motive of the salutary operations of the material world.

He was another dominator you know - Hitler. And he was a wonderful ballroom dancer. Not many people know that... Of course Mrs Hitler was a charming woman, wasn't she? She's still alive, you know. I saw her down the Egdware Road only the other day. She'd just popped into the chemist's to buy something, and I saw her sign the cheque 'Mrs Hitler' so I knew it was she.

There is only one good, which is knowledge, and one evil, which is ignorance.

His eye a ring inside a ring inside a ring That leers up, joyless, vile, in meek obscenity - This is the devil. Flesh to flesh, he bleats The herd back to the pit of being.

At this good news, so great The Devil's pleasure grew, That, with a joyful swish, he rent The hole where his tail came through.

'Great news! bloody news!' cried a newsman; The Devil said, 'Stop, let me see!' 'Great news? bloody news?' thought the Devil; 'The bloodier the better for me.'

Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this thing comes near us again I am finding it hard To praise you with a whole heart.

The daimonic is the urge in every being to affirm itself, assert itself, perpetuate and increase itself. The daimonic becomes evil when it usurps the total self without regard to the integration of that self, or to the unique forms and desires of others and their need for integration.

I am not addressing my own people, nor my fellow citizens of the holy Romans, but those who are now become citizens of demons by reason of their evil works. They have chosen, by their hostile deeds, to live in death; comrades of the Scotti and Picts and of all who behave like apostates, bloody men who have steeped themselves in the blood of innocent Christians. The very same people I have begotten for God; their number beyond count, I myself confirmed them in Christ.

Weave the warp, and weave the woof, The winding sheet of Edward's race. Give ample room and verge enough, The Characters of hell to trace.

If the general government should persist in the measures now threatened, there must be war. It is painful enough to discover with what unconcern they speak of war and threaten it. They do not know its horrors. I have seen enough of it to make me look upon it as the sum of all evils.

Professor Bell, in his tortured efforts to sound fair and impersonal, arrives at an aesthetic principle too edifying for Art to bear. He says in effect that you can explore evil, drawing 'on the tap roots of the demonic,' but you may not approve it. But when you draw on those tap roots, who knows what you will find? Writers just back from their season in hell are likely to be covered in goat blood and tend to rave. The moralists can sort out the evidence later. But the writer with the correct attitude could not have entered hell in the first place.

However Simon thought of the beast, there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human at once heroic and sick.