61 Sinister And Evil Quotes

In the shadows of storytelling and human imagination lies a fascination with the sinister and the malevolent. Evil, in its countless forms, serves as a potent catalyst in literature, film, and history—challenging characters to their limits and often revealing poignant truths about human nature. This curated collection of 61 sinister and evil quotes offers a glimpse into the minds of complex villains, the tension of haunting narratives, and the chilling philosophies that drive dark deeds. Whether you're seeking inspiration for your own writing or looking to delve into the darker aspects of human thought, these quotes capture the essence of evil with an unsettling allure. Join us on this journey through the macabre and the mysterious, where the darkest voices often whisper the most profound insights.

1. “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.” - Mahatma Gandhi

2. “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

3. “People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.” - Gregory Maguire

4. “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it.” - Tom Stoppard

5. “All that evil requires is an absence of virtue, where somebody didn't make a stand.” - Terry Darlington

6. “Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.” - Edward Abbey

7. “So you see, Good and Evil have the same face; it all depends on when they cross the path of each individual human being.” - Paulo Coelho

8. “Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.” - Henry James

9. “In this treacherous worldNothing is the truth nor a lie.Everything depends on the colorOf the crystal through which one sees it” - Pedro Calderón de la Barca

10. “Governments will rise, and governments will fall, and man will do evil to man, and all we can do is turn our hearts to good.” - Margaret Peterson Haddix

11. “We all have bad things inside us, and we all choose either to give in to those bad things or to fight them.” - Kristin Cast

12. “We are alive. We are human, with good and bad in us. That's all we know for sure. We can't create a new species or a new world. That's been done. Now we have to live within those boundaries . What are our choices? We can despair and curse, and change nothing. We can choose evil like our enemies have done and create a world based on hate. Or we can try to make things better.” - Carol Matas

13. “We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind. Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin.” - Robin Hanson

14. “Don’t be disheartened by the forces of evil. Nothing can happen that God hasn’t allowed. Even resistance is all part of grand orchestration. The devil always has you right were God wants you.” - Steve Maraboli

15. “- You take evil for good. It's a passing crisis. It's the result of your illness, perhaps.- You do despise me! It's simply that I don't want to do good, I want to do evil, and it has nothing to do with illness.- Why do evil?- So that everything will be destroyed. Oh, how nice it would be if everything were destroyed! You know, Alyosha, I sometimes think of doing a lot of harm. I would do it for a long while secretly and then suddenly everyone would find out. Everyone will stand around and point their fingers at me and I will look at them all. That would be awfully nice.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

16. “The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.” - Jeff Cooper

17. “Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.” - G.K. Chesterton

18. “But if you caught my informant,' said Achilles, 'why in the world would Chamrajnagar—or Graff, if it was him—launch the shuttle anyway? Was catching me doing something naughty so important they’d risk a shuttle and it’s crew just to catch me? I find that quite… flattering. Sort of like winning the Nobel Prize for scariest villain.” - Orson Scott Card

19. “There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.” - Oscar Wilde

20. “Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.” - Gregory Maguire

21. “...That insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

22. “When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.” - Lewis B. Smedes

23. “There is a difference between what is wrong and what is evil. Evil is committed when clarity is taken away from what is clearly wrong, allowing wrong to be seen as less wrong, excusable, right, or an obligatory commandment of the Lord God Almighty.Evil is bad sold as good, wrong sold as right, injustice sold as justice. Like the coat of a virus, a thin veil of right can disguise enormous wrong and confer an ability to infect others.” - John Hartung

24. “Some loves have to be given up, others have to be forgotten. Strange as it may sound, if you think of me as a monster, but I can love most passionately. I do not think of myself as evil.” - Christopher Pike

25. “Ms. Sophia was evil bananas.” - Lauren Kate

26. “The devil’s agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not?” - Arthur Conan Doyle

27. “Defenceless under the nightOur world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere,Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the JustExchange their messages:May I, composed like themOf Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the sameNegation and despair,Show an affirming flame.” - W.H. Auden

28. “If she knew me as I really am she would despise me, and certainly not aid or abet my evil designs. To veil their vices from the sight of the good is the only resource of those who are not blind and know themselves to be vicious.' Thus was I confirmed in habits of hypocrisy; and these, for a time, worked only too effectually to my advantage.” - William Beckford

29. “The thinnest thing in the world is the border between good and evil... my next The Opposite Of Magic.” - Ivan Stoikov - Allan Bard

30. “Many of you would like to take evil and step on it, destroying it like you would a bug. Squish, smash! Begone into another reality! This practice of eliminating human life because it is perceived as evil does you no good. In the end your history and experience are filled with war of one kind or another; humans fighting one another for the right to speak their truth and share their perception.And one human or another is always wanting to suppress someone else's ideas, someone else's thinking.” - Barbara Marciniak

31. “When it comes to judging individuals, I do not like remarks such as 'too good to be true.' They speak as though one is rewarding the nature of evil. Yet, ironically, we still wonder where all the good people have gone.” - Criss Jami

32. “Evil and I are old adversaries. When we compete I hate to lose," Manny Bettencourt from Murder in the Pinelands” - Larry Moniz

33. “There is no abstract Evil; you have to understand that! Its roots are here, all around us, in this herd that goes on chewing and having a good time only an hour after a murder! That's what you have to fight for. For people. Evil is a hydra with many heads, and the more of them you cut off, the more it grows! Hydras have to be starved to death, do you understand that? Kill a hundred Dark Ones, and a thousand more will take their place.” - Sergei Lukyanenko

34. “Possibility, or what we refer to as imagination, is 99% imitation. The real deal is only 1%. The problem is, this 1% is simultaneously referred to as Evil.” - Kouhei Kadono

35. “I have brought peace to this land, and security," he began."And what of your soul, when you use the cleverness of argument to cloak such acts? Do you think that the peace of a thousand cancels out the unjust death of one single person? It may be desirable, it may win you praise from those who have happily survived you and prospered from your deeds, but you have committed ignoble acts, and have been too proud to own them. I have waited patiently here, hoping that you would come to me, for if you understood, then some of your acts would be mitigated. But instead you send me this manuscript, proud, magisterial, and demonstrating only that you have understood nothing at all.""I returned to public life on your advice, madam," he said stiffly."Yes; I advised it. I said if learning must die it should do so with a friend by its bedside. Not an assassin.” - Iain Pears

36. “Masks camouflage the faces of both good and evil. Keeps hidden what is a truth and what is a lie.” - Patti Roberts

37. “My husband, Andrius, says that evil will rule until good men or women choose to act. I believe him. This testimony was written to create an absolute record, to speak in a world where our voices have been extinguished. These writing may shock or horrify you, but that is not my intention. It is my greatest hope that the pages in this jar stir your deepest well of human compassion. I hope they prompt you to do something, to tell somone. Only then can we ensure that this kind of evil is never allowed to repeat itself.” - Ruta Sepetys

38. “When one with honeyed words but evil mindPersuades the mob, great woes befall the state.” - Euripides

39. “But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep - into evil.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

40. “If there is no wound in your hand You can carry poison in your hand.Poison does not attack one who is unwounded. There is no evil for one who does not do evil.” - Anonymous

41. “You cannot stare evil in the face; it has no face. It has no body, no bones, no blood. Any attempt to describe it ends in glibness and self-delusion.” - Douglas Preston

42. “There were fourteen steps exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number.” - Stephen King

43. “O [Roman] people be ashamed; be ashamed of your lives. Almost no cities are free of evil dens, are altogether free of impurities, except the cities in which the barbarians have begun to live...Let nobody think otherwise, the vices of our bad lives have alone conquered us...The Goths lie, but are chaste, the Franks lie, but are but are generous, the Saxons are savage in cruelty...but are admirable in chastity...what hope can there be [for the Romans] when the barbarians are more pure [than they]?"-Salvian” - William J Federer

44. “Evil then consists not in being created but in the rebellious idolatry by which humans worship and honour elements of the natural world rather than the God who made them. The result is that the cosmos is out of joint. Instead of humans being God's wise vice-regents over creation, they ignore the creator and try to worship something less demanding, something that will give them a short-term fix of power or pleasure.” - N.T. Wright

45. “It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men's badness, which is impossible.” - Marcus Aurelius

46. “Doing nothing is even worse than doing the wrong thing.” - Michel Templet

47. “Everything at some point has been declared the root of all evil.” - Criss Jami

48. “Potter is mocked by a faculty member for the idea that there is evil in the world from which even children need to learn to defend themselves by the actual practice of doing so rather than familiarity with theory.” - J.K. Rowling

49. “You don't just have people who wake up in the morning and say, "What evil things can I do today, because I'm Mr. Evil?" People do things for what they think are justified reasons. Everybody is the hero of their own story, and you have to keep that in mind. If you read a lot of history, as I do, even the worst and most monstrous people thought they were the good guys. We're all very tangled knots.” - George R.R. Martin

50. “Loki'd!” - Tom Hiddleston

51. “Evil does not fight against evil, rather it struggles against Good. Where as, Good does not struggle against evil, rather it overwhelmingly defeats it".~R. Alan Woods [2012]” - R. Alan Woods

52. “...this refinement and delicacy were what Cale adored; but Cale had been beaten into shape, hammered in dreadful fires of fear and pain. How could she be with him for long? A secret part of Arbell had been searching for some time for a way to leave her lover—although she was unaware of this, it is only fair to record. And so as Cale waited for her to save him while he worked out a way of saving her, she had already chosen the bitter but reasonable path of the good, of the many over the one...” - Paul Hoffman

53. “There's more to people than some defined label," said Arcie. "There are more than straight good and evil, aye, even more than law or disorders or fence-sittin. There's prejudice, whimsey, affection, superstition, habit, upbringing, alliance, pride, society, morals, animosity, preference, values, religion, circumstance, humor, perversity, honor, vengeance, jealousy, frustration...hundreds o' factors, from the past and in every present moment, as decides what some one person'll do in an individious situation.” - Eve Forward

54. “I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.” - Glenn Gould

55. “Only the virtuous can count on life, the pursuer of evil can only ever count on death.” - Travis Berketa

56. “Virtue is imaginative. Evil, repetitive.” - Dean Koontz

57. “It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye.("For The Rest Of Her Life")” - Cornell Woolrich

58. “This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace, these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those oozing walls, --what declaimers!” - Victor Hugo

59. “Patrice had long since buried the particulars of events so painful that they caused her to resolve only to see good. With such a stance, such as dissociative split, she could walk with evil and believe it did not exist. She was Joe's perfect mate.” - Judith Spencer

60. “The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe's guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had been told. They would not have wanted to know. As those who saw and ignored the smoke from the crematoria of Hitler's Germany, they did not want to know that their world was not as it seemed.” - Judith Spencer

61. “Evil spawns mayhem while benevolence repairs; doing good comforts the living while prayers are extended to the one who attends to the dead.” - Donna Lynn Hope