Quotes About Evil

The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever.

There is a means to every end. A root to any cause. Sometimes the root is more evil than any cause, though it's the cause that is usually most vilified.

He knew evil could never be vanquished. It just moved from one place to another and waited.

Big evil. There was no doubt that the same callous malignancy moved through the blood of the shooter here.

An accident I could live with. All that time I was waiting, knowing that somebody had to die for me to live, I was getting myself ready to accept it as an accident. With an accident it's like it was fated or something. But a murder… that comes with evil intent attached. It's not happenstance. It means that I'm the benefactor of an act of evil, Doctor, and that's why it's different now.

He knew that the dark engine of murder would never run low on fuel. Not in his lifetime. Not in anyone's.

There is a means to every end. A root to any cause. Sometimes the root is more evil than the cause, though it's the cause that is usually the most vilified.

Man is depicted again and again as embracing evil, as being the instigator of his own downfall.

I was writing about a man who every day ventured into the human abyss, whose job took him across landscapes of chaos and its consequences. I was writing the story of a man who confronted horrific evil among men and who all the while wrestled with his own dark currents. From that day on he became Detective Hieronymus Bosch.

That's what my life was about for a long time," he added quietly. "I was searching out evil. That was my job. And I was good at it but in the long run it was better than me. It got the best of me. I think—no, I know—that's what took my heart.

Bittaker and Norris

It was every detective's nightmare. The worst-case scenario. A lead ignored or bungled, allowing something awful to be loose in the world. Something dark and evil, destroying life after life as it moved through the shadows. It was true that all detectives made mistakes and had to live with the regrets. But Bosch instinctively knew that this one was malignant. It would grow and grow inside until it darkened everything and he became the last victim, the last life destroyed.

This is the gift of your species and this is the danger, because you do not choose to control your imaginings. You imagine wonderful things and you imagine terrible things, and you take no responsibility for the choice. You say you have inside you both the power of good and the power of evil, the angel and the devil, but in truth you have just one thing inside you - the ability to imagine.

She thinks that if she gives it up, she'll lose the great abilities she believes she's acquired. It's a terrible paradox really: the mind falls in love with psychosis. The evil seduction, I call it. (186)

The problem with evil people is that they can see only evil in others. It is one of the worst curses of being evil, that you can no longer experience good.

Almost every story in the world has a back door through which the Devil can enter if he so chooses.

But people may do great good accidentally, though with evil intentions - conversely people may do great evil though having the best of intentions.

I have brought evil to many places," he said, "but usually there has already been evil to match mine. I seek no excuses, for I know what I am and I know what I have done. I have slain malignant sorcerers and destroyed oppressors, but I have also been responsible for slaying fine men, and a woman, my cousin, whom I loved, I killed—or my sword did.

Law and Chaos? I said. They're not the same as good and evil, I'm told. Merciful heavens, no! Not at all. Not at all. Evil is a cruel and selfish thing. Chaos can be wild and generous, and just as some Lords of Law are self-sacrificing and concerned for others, so are some Lords of Chaos.

slimy sorcery aids them!

The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a source of religious belief thousands of years older than the Bible, describes the state of consciousness between lives (the Bardo) as a time when "the evil we have perpetrated projects us into spiritual separation." If the peoples of the East believed in a special spiritual location for evil doers, was this idea similar to the concept of purgatory in the Western world?

Pathological evil in humans is characterized by feelings of personal impotence and weakness which is stimulated by helpless victims

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it's like a battery: you've got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

Every Christian will allow that sin is an evil, and that it is our duty not to commit sin.