Hatred is a complex and intense emotion that has shaped human experiences throughout history. While it can be destructive, understanding its impact through powerful words can offer insight and perspective. In this collection, we’ve gathered 76 thought-provoking quotes on hatred that explore its nature, consequences, and the ways we might overcome it. Whether you seek inspiration, reflection, or a deeper understanding, these quotes provide a meaningful look at one of humanity’s most challenging feelings.
1. “I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.” - Booker T. Washington
2. “Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ” - Jeffrey Eugenides
3. “Everything with me is either worship and passion or pity and understanding. I hate rarely, though when I hate, I hate murderously. For example now, I hate the bank and everything connected with it. I also hate Dutch paintings, penis-sucking, parties, and cold rainy weather. But I am much more preoccupied with loving.” - Anais Nin
4. “Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.” - Maya Angelou
5. “Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” - Malachy McCourt
6. “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.” - Siddhārtha Gautama
7. “...'You haven't got a chance kid,' he had told him glumly. 'They hate Jews.' 'But I'm not Jewish,' answered Clevinger. 'It will make no difference,' Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. 'They're after everybody.” - Joseph Heller
8. “Hatred would have been easier. With hatred, I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.” - Margaret Atwood
9. “I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow.And I water'd it in fears, Night & morning with my tears; And I sunnéd it with smiles And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night, Till it bore an apple bright; And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine, And into my garden stole, When the night had veil'd the pole: In the morning glad I see My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree.” - William Blake
10. “...the opposite of love is not hate -- it's apathy. It's not giving a damn. If somebody hates me, they must "feel" something ... or they couldn't possibly hate. Therefore, there's some way in which I can get to them.” - Leo F. Buscaglia
11. “Hatred needs scorn. Scorn is hatred's nectar!” - Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
12. “Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.” - George Bernard Shaw
13. “Gregory: Go to hell.Dane: I'd be glad to leave you in it.” - Anne Osterlund
14. “After visiting these two places (Berchtesgaden and the Eagle's lair on Obersalzberg) you can easily see how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country, which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made.” - John Fitzgerald Kennedy
15. “Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.” - Coretta Scott King
16. “The Whites have carried to these (colonial) people the worst that they could carry: the plagues of the world: materialism, fanaticism, alcoholism, and syphilis. Moreover, since what these people possessed on their own was superior to anything we could give them, they have remained themselves... The sole result of the activity of the colonizers is: they have everywhere aroused hatred.” - Adolf Hitler
17. “You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.” - Malcolm X
18. “When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.” - Graham Greene
19. “Soon all of you immortalsWill be as dead as we are! Come on then, what are you waiting for?Have you run out of thunderbolts?” - Euripides
20. “His hatred for her was now as solid as the boards he lay on, as the stones ringing the firepit.” - Stephen M. Irwin
21. “Hatred. Something almost as physical as walls, pianos, or nurses. She could almost touch the destructive energy leaking out of her body. She allowed the feeling to emerge, regardless of whether it was good or bad; she was sick of self-control, of masks, of appropriate behavior. Veronika wanted to spend her remaining two or three days of life behaving as inappropriately as she could.” - Paulo Coelho
22. “When you hate somebody...you give him chance mastering your heart.” - Toba Beta
23. “You know what they say," Amanda said. "Hatred isn't the opposite of love, it's just another variation of it. They both mean you have passionate feelings for someone.” - Robin Brande
24. “Prejudice is a disease. And when they come for you, or refuse your worth, I will be ready for their stones. I belong to you.” - Lady Gaga
25. “I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty. The love is a difficult love for it must incessantly separate the luminosity of the words and the violent verbal subjugation by a complacent God. The hatred is a difficult hatred for how can you allow yourself to hate words that are part of the melody of life in this part of the world? Words that taught us early on what reverence is?” - Pascal Mercier
26. “He spoke in hard and angry earnest, if a man ever did," replied the girl, shaking her head. "He is an earnest man when his hatred is up. I know many who do worse things; but I'd rather listen to them all a dozen times, than to that Monks once.” - Charles Dickens
27. “As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.” - Antonia Fraser
28. “Hate is the father of all evil.” - David Gemmell
29. “I am the One, and I see all.But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing.” - Dean Koontz
30. “When you try to persistently abolish hatred,at that very moment...you lose focus on love.” - Toba Beta
31. “I hate the day, because it lendeth lightTo see all things, but not my love to see.” - Edmund Spenser
32. “He turned, as he spoke, a peculiar look in her direction, a look of hatred unless he has a most perverse set of facial muscles that will not, like those of other people, interpret the language of his soul.” - Emily Brontë
33. “Love sometimes makes people ruthless in a way that not even hatred can.” - Francesca Marciano
34. “There are plenty of good reason for fighting," I said, "but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive. "It's that part of an imbecile," I said, "that punishes and vilifies and makes war.” - Kurt Vonnegut
35. “Why, she wondered, do we always reserve our worst hatred for our own?” - Donna Woolfolk Cross
36. “[W]hen someone finds himself quite unjustly attacked and hated on all sides, there is no need for such a person to feel dismayed by misfortune. See how Fortune, who has harmed many a one, is so inconstant, for God, Who opposes all wrong deeds, raises up those in whom hope dwells.” - Christine de Pizan
37. “It's lovely. I hate it.” - Tanith Lee
38. “Revenge in the hands of your enemies is a loaded gun. You can beg them for mercy, wave the white flag of surrender, but the only true elixir for the vitriol they bestow is a measure of hatred dispensed of your own.” - Addison Moore
39. “The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.” - Honoré de Balzac
40. “The way you blunder from one catastrophe to the next, it's a wonder the whole galaxy doesn't hate you.The galaxy is a big place, General. You provincial military types don't get far enough out to really see that.-General Tagon & Captain Kevyn Andreyasn” - Howard Tayler
41. “Signý knew she would die a thousand deaths upon seeing another woman with him, bearing his children, raising them with him. All the while, Signý, caged in his dungeons, hearing all the painful details of his life with someone else, drowning in her own despair, her love for him turning to hatred. A more tragic life, she could not imagine.” - Farrah Naseem
42. “... that kind of patriotism which consists in hating all other nations ...” - Elizabeth Gaskell
43. “…in that moment, as he saw and smelled how irresistible its effect was and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the people all around him—in that moment his whole disgust for humankind rose up again within him and completely soured his triumph, so that he felt not only no joy, but not even the least bit of satisfaction. What he had always longed for—that other people should love him—became at the moment of his achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them. And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred—in hating and in being hated.” - Patrick Suskind
44. “There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.” - Thornton Wilder
45. “Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.” - Bertrand Russell
46. “Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself lacks.” - Shannon L. Alder
47. “We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves.” - Mitch Albom
48. “Hatred is a form of faith, distilled by passion to remove all rationality.” - L.E. Modesitt Jr
49. “He couldn't think of a good place. At first he thought she hated all living beings equally. Lately he had come to believe he held a special place in her heart, just below rattlesnakes, pederasts, and spirochetes. Definitely a tough place to start from, but determination had always been Conal's strong point.” - John Varley
50. “I hate nobody except Hitler--and that is professional.” - Winston S. Churchill
51. “All that hatred down there," he said, "all that hatred and misery and love. It's a wonder it doesn't blow the avenue apart.” - James Baldwin
52. “Is our blood not the same color? Do we not bleed the same or share each other's burdens? ... What makes you and I so different, Ayden?” - Nadège Richards
53. “If you want to strengthen an enemy and make him exult - hate him.” - Idries Shah
54. “I believe that in a way, sadness is happiness for there can be no wrong without right, no light without dark, no success without failure, no relief without pain, no love without hatred and no Snow White without the evil queen.” - Lisa Cander
55. “Let his sword break and his shield shatter, Sansa thought coldly as she shoved out through the doors, let his courage fail him and every man desert him.” - George R.R. Martin
56. “If there were two enemies hating each other for a long time, to me, the winner would be the one who finally has the courage to forgive.” - Primadonna Angela
57. “This misfortune you find is of your own manufacture.Keep hold of what you have, it will harm no other,for hatred comes home to the hand that chose it.” - Simon Armitage
58. “Looking down from my throne full of thorns, I glanced at the people on Earth. Oh, man. I despised them. It wasn’t like they were becoming better humans or anything, Devil forbid. In fact, they all roasted in their sin, mayonnaised in their stupidity, tomato-sauced in their envy and anger toward each other....” - Cameron Jace
59. “There is a sacred horror about everything grand. It is easy to admire mediocrity and hills; but whatever is too lofty, a genius as well as a mountain, an assembly as well as a masterpiece, seen too near, is appalling. Every summit seems an exaggeration. Climbing wearies. The steepnesses take away one's breath; we slip on the slopes, we are hurt by the sharp points which are its beauty; the foaming torrents betray the precipices, clouds hide the mountain tops; mounting is full of terror, as well as a fall. Hence, there is more dismay than admiration. People have a strange feeling of aversion to anything grand. They see abysses, they do not see sublimity; they see the monster, they do not see the prodigy.” - Victor Hugo
60. “Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it.” - Catherynne M. Valente
61. “The only real conflict you will ever have in your life won’t be with others, but with yourself.” - Shannon L. Alder
62. “Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.” - Ta-Nehisi Coates
63. “I was just chased through St. Willibald’s, and you know why? Because I was kind to a quig. I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and then it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.” - Rachel Hartman
64. “Simon shook his head. ‘The Nazis in Germany…the Japanese here in Shanghai…Treating people as less than human because of the shape of their faces or the sound of their names. Sometimes it feels like the whole damn world is unraveling.” - Daniel Kalla
65. “Hatred makes you weak where else love makes you vulnerable. There's a difference.” - Lisa Cander
66. “If there's no hatred in your heart, then your mind won't find fault with others.” - Toba Beta
67. “People that have trust issues only need to look in the mirror. There they will meet the one person that will betray them the most.” - Shannon L. Alder
68. “They have never put it into words, they cannot; but each absence is a threat. They never felt this way in New York - they moved all over New York. Here each is afraid that one of the others will get into some terrible trouble before he is seen again, and before anyone can help him. It is the spirit of the people, the eyes which endlessly watch them, eyes which never meet their eyes. Something like lust, something like hatred, seems to hover in the air along the country roads, shifting like mist or steam, but always there, gripping the city streets like fog, making every corner a dangerous corner. They spend more of themselves, each day, than they can possibly afford, they are living beyond their means; they drop into bed each evening, exhausted, into an exhausting sleep. And no one can help them. The people who live here know how to do it - so it seems, anyway - but they cannot teach the secret. The secret can be learned only by watching, by emulating the models, by dangerous trial and possibly mortal error.” - James Baldwin
69. “...the older I get, the more I believe that if love is to be judged by most of its visible effects, it looks more like hatred than friendship.” - Paul Hoffman
70. “A thorn in your side will drive you to find someone or thing to remove it. Therefore, don't hate your enemies. Thank them. Without them, you wouldn't have traveled as far in your life to find peace and happiness.” - Shannon L. Alder
71. “All this miraculous hatred. Christ, a man can't eat his breakfast for filling his belly full of it.” - colum mccann
72. “Cruel people offer pity when they no longer feel threatened. However, kind people offer compassion and understanding regardless.” - Shannon L. Alder
73. “This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.” - Lauren Oliver
74. “I meant that the hatred of that July day in Nashville was alive and well on that horrible day in Pittsburgh. People hate others so they strike like snakes. It’s all connected—we’re all connected, bumping around into each other, some of us good, some bad, most a mixture. Every thought acted upon has consequences. Every one.” - Laura Anderson Kurk
75. “The hatred of hatred is still hate.” - Ralph Dominic Castro
76. “The paradox of anti-Semitism is that it is invariably up to the Jews to explain away the charges. The anti-Semite simply has to make them.” - jack bruce
