Carl Jung Quotes

I have an interest in understanding evil. Who is the bad guy - the vampire who kills people and sucks their blood, or the survivalists who kill people to save their own lives? Is evil merely a creation of people? Or is there an evil nature? Or is it in the eye of the beholder? I really like these questions.

The failure to readily identify the battle between good and evil is a nagging, ongoing, dangerous pattern that shows no sign of easing up any time soon.

You know how great villains just believe in what they're doing? In their minds they're not villains, they're not doing anything wrong; they're just self-righteous in their dedication to their cause.

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind of luxury.

We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and that we're the good guys. We condemn people as evil to reassure us that we're not like them. If there's to be any hope of preventing these things from happening again, we have to look at the reality. That any act of evil in our history was committed by human beings like us. That, very often, we're all implicated in it.

His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

If some incarnation of evil as unambiguous as Hitler appeared again, I would have no moral qualms about killing the enemy. But in the modern world of moral murkiness, I prefer to keep my hands as clean of enemy blood as possible.

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. . . Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.

I remember a time when things were a lot more fun around here, when good was good and evil was evil, before things got fuzzy.

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.

She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.

Usually people who are evil don't see themselves as evil.

On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.

There is a soul of truth in error; there is a soul of good in evil.

Good and evil lie close together. Seek no artistic unity in character.

I cannot endure the horror, the evil, which comes to self in solitude.

Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.

It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.

I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.

We need to be clear in calling out evil for what it is. When people will behead a child, and when people will leave people starving on top of a mountain without food or water - 40,000 of them - I don't care what religion it is: It's evil.

The (method of) correction shall by a turn become distortion, and the good in it shall by a turn become evil.

Every high degree of power always involves a corresponding degree of freedom from good and evil.

For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as something other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we receive the bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass.

Human reason can excuse any evil; that is why it's so important that we don't rely on it.