Steven Erikson Quotes

People do horrible things.

Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human.

Where there is no respect for life, there you will find evil.

Unlike other vices, cruelty, alas, is never boring.

I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible and they show that there were times, and there probably are times, that it is human to be inhuman.

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.

I've since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.

Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.

Is the capacity for cruelty inherent in all of us?

I've been fascinated by the idea that evil is the absence of empathy.

To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.

All breathing, existing, living, sentient creatures should not be slain, nor treated with violence, nor abused, nor tormented, nor driven away

It has always worried me that certain men of the Church have not understood that torture is never humane or Christian.

Murder is not absolved of immortality by committing murder. Murder is absolved of immorality by bringing men to think that murder is not evil. This only the perversion of the mind can bring about. And the perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defense are silent.

Can law, human law, change the nature of things? Can it turn darkness into light, or evil into good? By no means. Notwithstanding ten thousand laws, right is right, and wrong is wrong still. There must still remain an essential difference between justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy. … Who can reconcile this treatment of the Negroes, first and last, with either mercy or justice?

There are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them--none. That there are people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of the way

As heathens, the white people had been cruel enough, but as Christians, they were ten times more so. As heathens, they were not quite so audacious as to go and take vessel loads of men, women and children, and in cold blood, through devilishness, throw them into the sea, and murder them in all kind of ways. But being Christians, enlightened and sensible, they are completely prepared for such hellish cruelties.

That which is inhuman cannot be divine.

I think that the worst thing is realizing that mankind - that - that human beings can be so horrible to other human beings.

I'm trying to make order out of chaos, trying to find some way of rationalising the horrific things that people do or the way the world is.

Humanity is best described as inhumanity.

If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power... they will talk, they will gloat. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.

Evil requires no reason.

I have no pity! I have no pity! The more worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething, and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain.

War is a grim, cruel business, a business justified only as a means of sustaining the forces of good against those of evil.