Inherent Wickedness Quotes

Men are always wicked at bottom unless they are made good by some compulsion.

There is the seed of all sins--of the vilest and worst of sins--in the best of men.

Evil does not grow out of the soil, nor does mischief spring from the ground. Only man is born to do mischief, just as sparks fly upward.

I have the belief that truly evil people, it's a genetic evil. I only have the experience of exploring the landscape of some of the characters I've played that people have labeled as evil; I don't think they're evil.

There's two kinds of evil that horror fiction always deals with. One kind is the sort of evil that comes from inside people, like in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The other kind of evil is predestined evil. It falls on you like a stroke of lightning. That's the scary stuff, but, in a way, it's the stuff you don't have to worry about. I gotta worry whether or not I'm getting cavities. I gotta worry about whether cigarettes are giving me cancer. Those are things I can change. Don't give me lightning out of a clear sky. If that hits me I just say, "That's probably the way God meant it to be."

We are all born marked for evil.

I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.