Quintilian Quotes

There's not a lot of pure evil in the world, but it's amazing how little it takes to do great damage.

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.

In life and art, there are distinctions to be made between what an act of cruelty consists of.

Some might argue humans are hard-wired to fight. I don't agree: we are conscious beings who have the capacity to make decisions.

Really, no-one is bad except for serial killers and dictators.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

If I do not respond to some situation, my conscience kills me. I believe in permissible violence, not necessarily non-violence.

Even if people do wrong, we're social animals, so what can we do about stopping them doing the same things in future? Saying people are 'bad' or 'evil' is just an unwillingness to engage; an unwillingness to try to empathise. That sanctimonious attitude doesn't help anyone.

I'm still a firm believer that we were definitely put here to use our minds, and that is what makes us different. And that that's the key. If there is anything that is going to stop mankind from being such a beastly, destructive creature, it is reason.

The problem here is with a human being, not with a monster, not with an animal. The human being does things that even the monster does not do, because the human is more sophisticated.

Fair peace becomes men; ferocious anger belongs to beasts.

Even today we raise our hand against our brother... We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves as if it were normal we continue to sow destruction, pain, death. Violence and war lead only to death.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

We can't afford to be killing one another.

If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.

There's a difference between action and violence. Violence isn't fun.

Oh, no. It costs a lot more than your life. To murder innocent people?" says Peeta. "It costs everything you are.

Kill if you must, but never hate: Man is but grass and hate is blight, The sun will scorch you soon or late, Die wholesome then, since you must fight

Use sin as it will use you; spare it not, for it will not spare you; it is your murderer, and the murderer of the world: use it, therefore, as a murderer should be used. Kill it before it kills you.

Man has created death.

Most people are only too delighted to wreck each other's heads. And for the tiny minority who do their pathetic best not to, this world is going to go right ahead and make sure they do it anyway.

We are most like beasts when we kill. We are most like men when we judge. We are most like God when we forgive.

Morality, thou deadly bane,Thy tens o' thousands thou has slain!

People hurt each other. That's what people do.