Quotes about evil

The source of totalitarianism is a dogmatic attachment to the official word: the lack of laughter, of ironic detachment. An excessive commitment to Good may in itself become the greatest Evil: real Evil is any kind of fanatical dogmatism, especially exerted in the name of supreme Good... Consider only Mozart's Don Giovanni at the end of the opera, when he is confronted with the following choice: if he confesses his sins, he can still achieve salvation; if he persists, he will be damned forever. From this viewpoint of the pleasure principle, the proper thing to do would be to renounce his past, but he does not, he persists in his Evil, although he knows that by persisting he will be damned forever. Paradoxically, with his final choice of Evil, he acquires the status of an ethical hero - that is, of someone who is guided by fundamental principles beyond the pleasure principle and not just by the search for pleasure or material gain.

To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience.

"Good and bad is tricky," she said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face." (pp. 348-349)

"Down there," he said, "are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no." (p. 337)

"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people," said the man [Vetinari]. "You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides." (p. 337)

Devils and demons have no objective existence. They have always represented, again, portions of mankind’s own psychological reality that to some extent he had not assimilated -- but in a schizophrenic kind of expression, projected instead outward from himself.

Jehovah and the Christian version of God brought about a direct conflict between the so-called forces of good and the so-called forces of evil by largely cutting out all of the intermediary gods, and therefore destroying the subtle psychological give-and-take that occurred between them -- among them -- and polarizing man’s own view of his inner psychological reality.

It [i.e., his look] held the fatal mixture of stupidity and cunning that lurks at the bottom of all evil.

“Anita,” he asked, “are there really werewolves?”

“Yes,” she told him. “Your werewolves are down there.”

And that was right, he thought. The darkness of the mind, the bleakness of the thought, the shallowness of purpose. These were the werewolves of the world.

“Evil flourishes best in disguise,” said Otto grimly. His companions nodded in assent.

“And the best disguise is simple” said the youth, Federit Shaus. “Honest patriotism. Joyful idealism.”

“You’re a cynic, lad,” von Bek smiled at him. “But sadly my own experience would support your view. Show me a man who cries ‘my country right or wrong’, and I’ll show you one who’d cheerfully murder half his own nation in the name of patriotism.”

An angel is often only a demon who stands between us and our enemy.

Every person, you see, is like a plant. There is a beautiful green part, often with flowers or fruit, that grows upward toward the sun, toward the Increate. There is also a dark part that grows away from it, tunneling where no light comes. [...] Was I speaking of good and evil? It is the roots that give the plant the strength to climb toward the sun, though they know nothing of it. [...] The things we love in others and admire in ourselves spring from things we do not see and seldom think about.