Human Evil Quotes

A beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel.

Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Evil is not any superhuman, but it is HUMAN.

The malevolence of men revealed itself to his mind in all of its ugliness

Unfortunately, a human being is able to comprehend only that amount of evil which he is able to commit himself.

The individual comes face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind has not come to a realisation of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent.

I began to see what people were capable of doing. Anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

The world is a more mysterious place than we admit sometimes - there is more to the world than just human evil.

As an actor, I've given up judgement of evil, as long as it's human evil - we have to see ourselves for what we really are, and we're capable of horrific things.

Studying chimps, I came to the conclusion that being evil is something that only humans are capable of. A chimp would never plan to pull another's nails out. The chimps' way of aggression is quick and brutal. I compare them to gang attacks.

If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?

There are no explanations for human evil. Only excuses.

...Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office.

In being realistic we do not always have to be pessimistic. Christ never blinked his eyes at bad things. But he never became so obsessed with human evil that he lost faith in man.

There's no use wasting are energy being afraid of the devils, demons and things that go bump in the night... Because ultimately we'll never encounter anything more terrifying than the monster among us. Hell is where we make it.

There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.

People cannot accept their own evil if they do not at the same time feel loved, respected and trusted.

[Abortion] is an evil in and of itself, but it is not a religious evil in the beginning, no, it's a human evil. Then obviously, as with every human evil, each killing is condemned.

Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.

The common trait of all evil is nothing other than egoism... Basically all human evil comes from what we call the selfishness.

I can't explain 9/11, except the evil of man.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.

As human beings we have the most extraordinary capacity for evil. We can perpetrate some of the most horrendous atrocities.

We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It's beyond reason.