evil Quotes

“It is important to fight and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then can evil be kept at bay though never quite eradicated.”

“Evil is ignorance.”

“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil—a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.”

“It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you.”

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

“One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. ”

“The Devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape.”

“My stars shine darkly over me; the malignancy of my fate might, perhaps, distemper yours; therefore I shall crave of you your leave that I may bear my evils alone. It were a bad recompense for your love to lay any of them on you.”

“So fair and foul a day I have not seen.”

“You know how a voice can stir one. Your voice and the voice of Sibyl Vane are two things that I shall never forget. When I close my eyes, I hear them, and each of them says something different. I don’t know which to follow.”

″‘Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil,’ cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.”

“It was a pedestal from which a god had been torn, and in his place there stood, not Satan with a sword, but a corner lout sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola.”

“Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.”

“There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.”

“We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil—she, as mistress, I, as slave.”

“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.”

“Vianne didn’t hesitate. She knew now that no one could be neutral—not anymore—and as afraid as she was of risking Sophie’s life, she was suddenly more afraid of letting her daughter grow up in a world where good people did nothing to stop evil, where a good woman could turn her back on a friend in need. She reached for the toddler, took him in her arms.”

“A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”

“To while away the day contemplating evils that might have been is to poison the happiness we already have.”

“Chris would use the spiritual aspect to try to motivate us. He’d tell us to think about all the evil in the world, all the hatred, and imagine ourselves running against the forces of darkness, the evil wall that was trying to keep us from running our best. He believed that doing well was all mental, a simple matter of harnessing whatever energy was available.”

“There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.”

“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.”

“She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.”

“I had learned to dwell with pleasure as a beloved daydream on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each I told myself could be housed in separate identities life would be relieved of all that was unbearable the unjust might go his way delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path doing the good things in which he found his pleasure and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.”

“O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”

For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men

“Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.”

“The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?”

“An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”

“All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely preambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils.”

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

“It is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the Enemy, for good or for ill.”

“There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the Beast. . . . Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! . . . You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are the way they are?”

“Simon, walking in front of Ralph, felt a flicker of incredulity—a beast with claws that scratched, that sat on a mountain-top, that left no tracks and yet was not fast enough to catch Samneric. However Simon thought of the beast, there rose before his inward sight the picture of a human, at once heroic and sick.”

“What I mean is . . . maybe it’s only us”

“You’re my daughter. I don’t care about the factions.” She shakes her head. “Look where they got us. Human beings as a whole cannot be good for long before the bad creeps back in and poisons us again.”

“Only twice in my life have I seen eyes like that—not like human eyes. ”

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one…”

“On Cain’s kindred did the everlasting Lord avenge the murder, for that he had slain Abel; he had no joy of that feud, but the Creator drove him far from mankind for that misdeed. Thence all evil broods were born, ogres and devils and evil spirits — the giants also, who long time fought with God, for which he gave them their reward.”

“Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion. Once pain has roused him, he knows that he is in some way or other ‘up against’ the real universe: he either rebels (with the possibility of a clearer issue and deep repentance at some other stage) or else makes some attempting at an adjustment, which, if pursued, will lead him to religion.”

“None of my ten friends, even today, ascribes moral evil to Hitler, although most of them think (after the fact) that he made fatal strategical mistakes which even they themselves might have made at the time. His worst mistake was his selection of advisers—a backhand tribute to the Leader’s virtues of trustfulness and loyalty, to his very innocence of the knowledge of evil, fully familiar to those who have heard partisans of F. D. R. or Ike explain how things went wrong.”

“The other nine, decent, hard-working, ordinarily intelligent and honest men, did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now. None of them ever knew, or now knows, Nazism as we knew and know it; and they lived under it, served it, and, indeed, made it.”

“I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind.”

“At last the Turkish Delight was all finished and Edmund was looking very hard at the empty box and wishing that she would ask him whether he would like some more. Probably the Queen knew quite well what he was thinking; for she knew, though Edmund did not, that this was enchanted Turkish Delight and that anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.”

″‘She is a perfectly terrible person,’ said Lucy. ‘She calls herself the Queen of Narnia thought she has no right to be queen at all...And she can turn people into stone and do all kinds of horrible things. And she has made a magic so that it is always winter in Narnia—always winter, but it never gets to Christmas. And she drives about on a sledge, drawn by reindeer, with her wand in her hand and a crown on her head.’

“The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?”

“On the festival nights, nightmares take shape and prowl the yard. Ancient entities of supreme evil patrol the darkness in search of prey.”

“I think it’s something about the inevitability. How nothing can keep them apart-not her selfishness, or his evil, or even death, in the end...”

″‘We’d better hurry or we’ll be late for dinner,’ I said, breaking into what Finny called my “West Point stride.” Phineas didn’t really dislike West Point in particular or authority in general, but just considered authority the necessary evil against which happiness was achieved by reaction, the backboard which returned all the insults he threw at it.”

You said you were death itself. Are you evil, then, or are you simply stronger and more awake than others?

“If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”

“But gods there be certainly, and they take care for the world; and as for those things which be truly evil, as vice and wickedness, such things they have put in a man’s own power, that he might avoid them if he would: and had there been anything besides that had been truly bad and evil, they would have had a care of that also, that a man might have avoided it.”

“In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed things—perhaps even in being essentially identical with them.”

“TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.”

“Did you never observe the narrow intelligence flashing from the keen eye of a clever rogue—how eager he is, how clearly his paltry soul sees the way to his end; he is the reverse of blind, but his keen eye-sight is forced into the service of evil, and he is mischievous in proportion to his cleverness?”

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.”

“As Sam stood there, even though the Ring was not on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, a vast and ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor... Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason.”

“What had human beings become? Did war make us evil or just activate an evil already lurking within us?”

“I suppose all the old fairy tales are more or less true. And you’re simply a wicked, cruel magician like the ones in the stories. Well, I’ve never read a story in which people of that sort weren’t paid out in the end, and I bet you will be.”

“But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.”

The fact that the demons obey Him is evidence of Satan being bound. Satan is already bound “in heaven” — by heaven’s power. His power is broken. The key is given to us.

“Suddenly the King leaned hard on his friend’s neck and bowed his head. ‘Jewel,’ he said, ‘what lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.’ ‘Yes,’ said Jewel. ‘We have lived too long. The worst thing in the world has come upon us.’ They stood like that for a minute or two and then went on.”

″‘Excuse me,’ said the Cat very politely, ‘but this interests me. Does your friend from Calormen say the same?’ ‘Assuredly,’ said the Calormene. ‘The enlightened Ape--Man, I mean--is in the right. Aslan means neither less nor more than Tash.’ ‘Especially, Aslan means no more than Tash?’ suggested the Cat. ‘No more at all,’ said the Calormene, looking the Cat straight in the face. ‘Is that good enough for you, Ginger?’ said the Ape. ‘Oh certainly,’ said Ginger cooly, ‘Thank you very much. I only wanted to be quite clear. I think I am beginning to understand.‘”

“But sometimes I think sailors have an extra sense that tells them when they are in danger. Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing--with wave lengths, just as sound and light have.”

“He doesn’t know what the truth means, so he does not even know how he lies. ”

“For the fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretence of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which men in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”

“I have fought fire with fire ... and I ought to have done it sooner! ”

″ One never learns how the witch became wicked. ”

“This was evil’s hour: we could not run from it. Perhaps only when human effort had done its best and failed, would God’s power alone be free to work.”

“Every bad man is ignorant what he ought to do and what to leave undone, and by reason of such error men become unjust and wholly evil.”

“It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence, and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I remained merely bewildered—so far, that is, as I was not outraged—by the sense of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her that it was grotesque. She promptly understood me. ‘You mean the cruel charge—?’ ‘It doesn’t live an instant. My dear woman, LOOK at him!‘”

“Now I thought he was mad cause I ain’t done my work. But I see where he was chasing me off so he could have the gal for himself. When I see what the matter of it was, I lost all fear of my daddy. Right there is where I became a man . . . at fourteen years of age.”

“Evil must be punished. Even in the face of Armageddon I shall not compromise.”

“Let us occupy ourselves entirely in knowing God. The more we know Him, the more we will desire to know Him. As love increases with knowledge, the more we know God, the more we will truly love Him. We will learn to love Him equally in times of distress or in times of great joy.”

“Does one deserve to have evil done to her by consequence of putting herself where evil can reach her?”

“Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and as such should be seen as valuable; without them we have no originality).”

“It’s ... a job that needs to be done ... wrong cannot be allowed to stand. ”

“Evil is a faceless stranger, living in a distant neighborhood. Evil has a wholesome, hometown face, with merry eyes and an open smile. Evil walks among us, wearing a mask which looks like all our faces.”

″‘There are evils beyond death,‘said his sister. ‘Fly you high, Henry. Fly you high.‘”

″...‘you heard the story of Hill House and decided not to stay. How would you leave, tonight?’ He looked around at them again, quickly. ‘The gates are locked. Hill House has a reputation for insistent hospitality; it seemingly dislikes letting its guests get away. The last person who tried to leave Hill House in darkness—it was eighteen years ago, I grant you—was killed at the turn in the driveway, where his horse bolted and crushed him against the big tree. Suppose I tell you about Hill House, and one of you wants to leave? Tomorrow, at least, we could see that you got safely to the village.‘”

″‘Essentially,’ he went on slowly, ‘the evil is the house itself, I think. It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, it is a place of contained ill will. […].‘”

“It was the belief of Bokonon that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping the tension between the two high at all times.”

“Dust is something bad, something wrong, something evil and wicked.”

“Good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.”

“If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.”

“Well, Angelo, your evil quits you well. ”

“The person who understands the evil in his own heart is the only person who is useful, fruitful, and solid in his beliefs and obedience. ”

“The Chicago Times-Herald wrote of Holmes, ‘He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character.‘”

“No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.”

“We do not know if, out on the moons of Saturn, you will meet with good or with evil—or only with ruins a thousand times older than Troy.”

“Firmly persuaded that no evil exists in the world that God did not design to take place, I build my belief on the perfection of God.”

“Why do so many people do nothing? I think it’s because most of us look at the evils and injustice around us, and we become overwhelmed.”

“I will be a wise and tolerant monarch, dispencing justice fairly, and only setting nightmares to rip out the winds of the evil and the wicked. Or just anybody that I don’t like.”

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of the opinion is, that it is robbing the human race.”

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.”

“To make anyone answerable for doing evil to others, is the rule; to make him answerable for not preventing evil, is, comparatively speaking, the exception.”

“Dent’s crimes were brilliantly pathological the most horrendous of which was his last--he was apprehended in the act by Gotham’s famous vigilante, the Batman, and committed to Arkham Asylum twelve years ago.”

“Woman explodes in subway station--film at eleven.”

″...A new life begins today for Harvey Dent. Dent, a former district attorney became obsessed with the number two when half his face was scarred by acid. Dent believe his disfiguration revealed a hidden, evil side to his nature. He adopted as his personal symbol a dollar coin...”

“What we did see—for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned—was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”;”

“I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.”

“Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.”

“In his mind a new song had come, the Song of Evil, the music of the enemy, of any foe of the family, a savage, secret, dangerous melody, and underneath, the Song of the Family cried plaintively.”

″‘But, see, I had a plan, too.’ He kept approaching. ‘And it turns out, your plan was only a part of my plan.‘”

“You’re smug, you’re irritating, you talk too much, you’re not half as clever as you think you are, and under it all? You’re pure evil.”

“This is ... this is going to be a fun night.”

“If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? ”

“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. ”

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un uprooted small corner of evil.”

“Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”

“What a fool you are, Basta! I’m not talking about children’s magic. I mean the magic of the written word. Nothing is more powerful for good or evil, I do assure you.”

″‘And as for running - where would we run to? God is everywhere. There will always be Nazis among us. No, my child, do not tremble before mere men. It is God before whom we must tremble. Only God. We will go ahead, just as we have planned. After all, this is our shtetl, not theirs, and there is still a wedding to be made.”

An evil and greedy man has become dictator and turned the Tree into a desolate wasteland, caring only about making money. Toby might be the only one to stop him. Overall, a fast-paced book that keeps you reading, the evil characters seemed a little bit too evil to me and I didn’t realize the book was set-up for a sequel!

“Grinning is something you do when you are entertained in some way, such as reading a good book or watching someone you don’t care for spill orange soda all over himself.”

“All the coldness and darkness and infinite loneliness of the world filled David’s mind until it seemed ready to burst.”

He finds out that he is in fact famous, and a wizard! Unknown to Harry, his parents died when they came up against the evil Lord Voldemort, and it was Harry that killed Lord Voldemort, with only a lightning bolt scar on his forhead to show for it. He is “the boy that lived”. As Harry enrols at Hogwarts School Witchcraft & Wizardry, he meets new friends, and comes up against old enemies.

“Evil never wants to be noticed, I should mention here. It sneaks in and hijacks our minds, and we barely notice anything’s amiss.”

“Ah! well a-day! what evil looks Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross About my neck was hung.”

“For at all times we must so serve Him with the good things He has given us, that he may not, as an angry Father, disinherit his children, nor as a dread Lord, provoked by our evil deeds, deliver us to everlasting punishment as wicked servants who refuse to follow Him to glory.”

“With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose. ”

“Evil is the nature of mankind.”

“Don’t you listen to that Quaker Abolitionist and that free boy. They got evil in their words and destruction in their ways.”

“The truth is that we have done far too little, for we have never apologized. We have never fully, publicly acknowledged the evil that was done to African-Americans as evil. The Civil War obliterated a wicked institution, but a war alone cannot obliterate wicked thinking. Slavery ended but racism continued, and in many ways it intensified after that war. Slavery existed only in the South, but racism pervades the entire country.”

“Situations can change; people can change. Be the first to seek to bring good. Do not grow accustomed to evil, but defeat it with good.”

“What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?”

“Science is just another word for knowledge, and knowledge in itself is neither good nor evil.”

“Oh! anger is an evil thing And spoils the fairest face; It cometh like a rainy cloud Upon a sunny place. One angry moment often does What we repent for years: It works the wrong we ne’re make right By sorrow or tears.”

“It was his solemn duty to appear in the corridor once a week, and to gibber from the large oriel window on the first and third Wednesdays in every month, and he did not see how he could honourably escape from his obligations. It is quite true that his life had been very evil, but, upon the other hand, he was most conscientious in all things connected with the supernatural.”

“He that does good, having the unlimited power to do evil, deserves praise not only for the good which he performs, but for the evil which he forbears.”

The evil from that chilling incident still grips Cheshunt and is now rapidly gaining power. Nathaniel finds himself drawn to a group of misfits at school and they are soon involved in a struggle against the terrible forces that seek total control of the community.

“Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.”

“Experience tells us that certain people are not ever going to change. This is a reality, and this is the reality we need to deal with when it comes to our toxic family members. The Bible clearly tells us that evil people—those who have hardened themselves to that which is good—do not change, not because they can’t but because they won’t.32”

″‘The evil thing, the shadow that hunts me, has no name.’ ‘All things have a name,’ said Ogion”

“Alas! Oh, Chanticleer, alas! I have done you a bad turn. I frightened you when I grabbed you and took you out of the yard. But, Sir, I did it without evil intention.”

″‘I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider’s web. I saved the victim’s life.’ ‘The firefly’s?’ said the minstrel. ‘The spider’s. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.‘”

“Darkness was already closing in. There was a kind of glare in the evil heaven.”

“We should not accept an evil we can change. We would stand up against it, would we not? Yes. We should. We would be heroes, even.”

″‘Granddad held so much power,’ I say. ‘And now he doesn’t. We changed an evil we saw in the world.‘”

“People are naïve about such things...and they would rather write them off as evil than attempt to understand them. An unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.”

“I can’t believe that I—did that! I know now what you meant by opening your heart to evil...”

“It was strange that we were called evil when humans were the ones who enjoyed watching us burn.”

“It’s a beautiful building, but there’s something rotten at its heart. Now he’s discovered it he can smell the stench of it everywhere.”

“It is the eve of St. George’s Day. Do you not know that to-night, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway? Do you know where you are going, and what you are going to?”

“Well, that’s what I shrink from, Bill. It’s so horribly cold-blooded. Cayley may be capable of it, but I hate to think of it.”

“Do as you will, friend; do as you will. There can be no horror like this ever any more;”

“He knew, by some spiritual sense,—for the Creator never made another being so sensitive as this,—he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his heart-strings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it.”

“And does he now summon me to its fulfilment, by suggesting the performance of every wickedness which his most foul imagination can conceive?”

“Oh! he is black at heart, hollow and black!”

“The Jungle-People put them out of their mouths and out of their minds. They are very many, evil, dirty, shameless, and they desire, if they have any fixed desire, to be noticed by the Jungle People. But we do not notice them even when they throw nuts and filth on our heads.”

“What will he do for us? He is not of our tribe, being footless—and with most evil eyes,”

“You have a wonderful influence. Let it be for good, not for evil.”

“that I should reason with you a little about causes and effects, about the best of possible worlds, the origin of evil, the nature of the soul, and the pre-established harmony.”

As yet I looked upon crime as a distant evil, benevolence and generosity were ever present before me, inciting within me a desire to become an actor in the busy scene where so many admirable qualities were called forth and displayed.