Quotes about evil

Most police work boils down to minimizing the impact on society of stupidity; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority is about malice and deliberate evil, but it’s still almost all stupid.

Along the way she’d acquired a powerful conviction that history was a series of accidents—God was either absent or playing a very elaborate practical joke (the Eschaton didn’t count, having explicitly denied that it was a deity)—and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.

There is … a clever maxim which bears upon what I was saying to you some little while ago, and that is, that unless wicked ideas take root in a naturally depraved mind, human nature, in a right and wholesome state, revolts at crime. Still, from an artificial civilisation have originated wants, vices, and false tastes, which occasionally become so powerful as to stifle within us all good feelings, and ultimately to lead us into guilt and wickedness...

"When you stopped believing in God, did you stop believing in good and evil?"

"No. But I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that's an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels."

There's something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property. The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil. (Bibikov)

The purest evil that human efforts could attain, in other words, was probably achieved by those men who made their wills the same and who made their eyes see the world in the same way, men who went against the pattern of life's diversity, men whose spirits shattered the natural wall of the individual body, making nothing of this barrier, set up to guard against mutual corrosion, men whose spirit accomplished what flesh could never accomplish.

The bad guys tend to enjoy killing people, preferably in large numbers. The good guys – and girls – don’t; they get a buzz when infant mortality rates go down and life expectancy goes up. The bad guys like to tell people what to do, the good guys are happy to encourage people to make up their own minds. The bad guys like to keep the riches and the power to themselves and their cronies, the good guys want the money and power spread evenly, subject to the making-up-your-own-minds thing.

Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad.

The world seems full of good men—even if there are monsters in it.

When a wizard goes over ter the Dark Side there's nothin' and no one matters to 'em anymore.…

There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it …

Billy asked him if such men as had stole his eyes were only products of the war but the blind man said that since war itself was their very doing that could hardly be the case.