Malevolence Quotes

“Look, it's easy to outsmart a werewolf or a vampire," Jace said. "They're no smarter than anyone else. But faeries live for hundreds of years and they're as cunning as snakes. They can't lie, but they love to engage in creative truth-telling. They'll find out whatever it is you want most in the world and give it to you—with a sting in the tail of the gift that will make you regret you ever wanted it in the first place."
He sighed. "They're not really about helping people. More about harm disguised as help.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

“Malevolence spilled from the woman like morning mist.”
― Hafsah Faizal, We Hunt the Flame

“Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence—like vision, motor coordination, and common sense—does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!”
― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“I know that look, seeing a dead body for the first time, you never quite get used to it…”
― Cade Mengler, The Companions

“One after another, deliberate actions focused on Neil. He identified no reason. For fifteen months, he lived in harmony with the church and the community. An assault on him and his character began the past Saturday evening. Someone painted his portrait in blood on the barn wall and contrived evidence to implicate him in the murders.”
― Steve Rush, Lethal Impulse

“Flashes of disbelief trekked in multiple directions. Each one faded into despair.”
― Steve Rush, Lethal Impulse

“Man has 2 common problems with God: the one is that there is evil in the world; the other is that free will is limited. The one, he is charging that the world is too evil; the other is that it is not evil enough.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Malevolence takes a bite out off your spirit. Just sitting with it, just talking with people who consciously and deliberately exploit others, feels like being beaten. Over the years, l have seen many therapists burn out and leave the field entirely. [Refers to treating sex offenders, p6]”
― Anna Salter, Predators: Pedophiles, Rapists, and Other Sex Offenders

“The creation of man is evidence for the love of God, the preservation of man is evidence for the patience of God, and Christ is evidence for the forgiveness of God. It is when we are wrapped up in our own little peeves that we begin to displace His benevolence with malevolence.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Words spoken from spite corrode hearts, especially for the one talking.”
― AAAA

“Malevolence, like love, needs few words.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Sibyl

“For every woman you know who has been given substandard treatment by her parents, used by her friend or boyfriend, abused by her husband, discriminated by her employers and ridiculed by society, I know a man who has been burdened with family responsibility since childhood, humiliated by his girlfriend, bullied by his employers, pushed by society and harassed by his wife. Everybody is fighting their own battle.”
― Sanjeev Himachali

“I think: you deserve to be what you are if you could bare to get that way. You must have seen it coming. And now there's nothing for you here. No one will protect you, and people won't see any reason not to do you harm.”
― Martin Amis

“Conscious human malevolence can break the spirit even tragedy could not shake.”
― Jordan B. Peterson

“Mr. Frederick Parker spent a good deal of his time in endeavouring to mask, under a cloak of boisterous good humour, a really remarkable combination of malevolence and imbecility.”
― Norman Douglas, South Wind

“Mankind, not womankind, has slaughtered more humans in the name of God and Religion than for any other reason.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“His base sins were envy - of beauty, of happiness - and pride, bending the whole world to his view of creation, and these were the greatest sins of all, the same transgressions over which the devil himself, once an archangel, had stumbled and fallen a long way out of Heaven.”
― Dean Koontz, Intensity

“Aggression, rage and violence are archetypal foundations of manhood.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Islamophobic Civilization: Voyage of Acceptance

“The human beings must be mentally immensely strong, during the encounter with the true malevolence in others, because on it's own it doesn't belong to their species.”
― Mladen Đorđević, Svetioničar - Vesnici oluje

“There is a kind of laughter that sickens the soul. Laughter when it is out of control: when it screams and stamps its feet, and sets the bells jangling in the next town. Laughter in all its ignorance and its cruelty. Laughter with the seed of Satan in it. It tramples upon shrines; the belly-roarer. It roars, it yells, it is delirious: and yet it is as cold as ice. It has no humour. It is naked noise and naked malice.”
― Mervyn Peake, Boy in Darkness and Other Stories

“air of silent malevolence, like a puffed, venomous mushroom”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“If they want to love you, they’ll find every excuse to love you: they’ll believe any good truth ignoring any bad lie. If they want to hate you, they’ll find every excuse to hate you: they’ll believe any bad lie ignoring any good truth. And if you want to find your dreams, you’ll find every possible and every impossible ethical and fair way to make them come true ignoring any malicious prejudice.”
― Maria Karvouni

“Contention is a bile that when stirred becomes malevolence.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, The Tarishe Curse

“There were influences of a wholly unsuspected kind already gathering round the poor vicar, William Wylder; as worlds first begin in thinnest vapour, and whirl themselves in time into consistency and form, so do these dark machinations, which at times gather round unsuspecting mortals as points of revolution, begin nebulously and intangibly, and grow in volume and in density, till a colossal system, with its inexorable tendencies and forces, crushes into eternal darkness the centre it has enveloped.”
― Sheridan Le Fanu, Wylder's Hand: Enriched edition. Unraveling Secrets in 19th-Century Ireland: A Gothic Tale of Deception and the Supernatural

“You have heard---or anyway you will---people talk about evil times or an evil generation. There are no such things. No epoch of history nor generation of human beings either ever was or is or will be big enough to hold the unvirtue of any given moment, anymore than they could contain all the air of any given moment; all they can do is hope to be as little soiled as possible during their passage through it.”
― William Faulkner, The Reivers

“Rarely, if ever, does our conscience realizes the crisis our evil deeds cause. Seems the human mind is wired to find joy in another's misfortune. The Germans call it Schadenfreude.”
― Sushil Rungta

“Bereaved, she made it home, thanked the neighbor and headed to bed to sob herself to sleep.
Rich’s arrival from work was followed by a rattlesnake response to the two children wandering the house without supervision. Finding Gail in bed, he berated his wife for her selfishness.
Gail announced the miscarriage to Rich. “I hope you’re happy.”
He shrugged and said, “I’m sorry about that. Comm ci comme sa. You win some, you lose a bunch. I guess I’ll go fix spaghetti for the girls.”
She turned over to look him in the eye. “It was a beautiful, perfectly formed little boy,” she said with a tear-streaked face. Rich looked a little stunned at the news.
He heard his wife’s voice dull compared to the coursing blood in his ears. “Yes, he looked like you. His curls, his lashes…” Maybe he would have wanted a son, but the wheels of his mind kept turning. “There’s always another night, another baby to be had when he’s out of college, another son to be born when we’re more financially stable.” “If you wouldn’t have tricked me…”
“Into this pregnancy,” she finished his thought. “And so, you think you have tricked me back.”
― Lynn Byk, The Fearless Moral Inventory of Elsie Finch

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able but not willing? Then, he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
― Epicurus

“He stared at me and, though the fate he pronounced was golden, there was a malevolence in his dead eyes. ‘You will be king,’ he said, and the last word sounded like poison on his tongue.”
― Bernard Cornwell, Sword Song

“True monsters are not malevolent: rather, they are of the mindset that humanity is beneath consideration. Humanity is to them as insects are to us.”
― Jacob Graham