Quotes About Evil

To hint to unimaginative people of a horror beyond all human conception—a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds—would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of restful rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his mysticism.

Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they were real.

Of witch, and demon

like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell.

The man of Truth is beyond good and evil," intoned a voice that was not a voice. "The man of Truth has ridden to All-Is-One. The man of Truth has learnt that Illusion is the only reality, and that substance is an impostor.

The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men.

But whoever thinks that beauty is something he can enjoy exclusively for himself just by abandoning other people and closing his eyes to the human life of which he is part—he is not the friend of beauty. He who doesn't fight every day of his life to the last breath against the representatives of evil, against the living images of evil who rule Sviðinsvík—he blasphemes by taking the word beauty into his mouth.

All sex, and indeed all pleasure, must include a poisonous drop of perversion, of devilish transgression—of evil, even—for it to be worth getting into bed for.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.

The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a "completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him," the implication being that the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and present the true enigma of the trial.

In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.

Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.

Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would 'partake nothing of the sordid or sensual' (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

And if it is true that in the final stages of totalitarianism an absolute evil appears (absolute because it can no longer be deduced from humanly comprehensible motives), it is also true that without it we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom...and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.

As?l sorun tam da Eichmann gibi onlarca insan?n olmas?ndan, onlarcas?n?n ne sap?k ne de sadist olmas?ndan; ne yaz?k ki hepsinin eskiden de, ÅŸimdi de dehÅŸet verici biçimde normal olmas?ndan kaynaklan?yordu. s.281

As Eichmann told it, the most potent factor in the soothing of his own conscience was the simple fact that he could see no one, no one at all, who actually was against the Final Solution. He did

For are not all things created by God? How could God have created evil? [God] made all natures, not only those which persevered in virtue and justice, but also those that were to sin; and the latter [He made] not that they should sin, but that they might decorate the universe whether they wished to sin or not to sin.58

Das Böse ist immer nur extrem, aber niemals radikal, es hat keine Tiefe, auch keine Dämonie. Es kann die ganze Welt verwüsten, gerade weil es wie ein Pilz an der Oberfläche weiterwuchert. Tief aber und radikal ist immer nur das Gute.

What for Hitler , the sole, lonely plotter of the Final Solution (never had a conspiracy, if such it was, needed fewer conspirators and more executors), was among the war's main objectives, with its implementation given top priority, regardless of economic and military considerations, and what for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world.