If I play a villain, I try to find his lightness and his good side. And if I play a hero or a good guy, I’ll try to find his darkness or his flaws. Because I don’t believe in good and evil. I believe in grays. – Joel Kinnaman
Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. – Joseph Brodsky
It is not good practice to become intrigued by Satan and his mysteries. No good can come from getting close to evil. – James E. Faust
Whatever contributes to the preservation of life is good; all that destroys life is evil. – Gerhard Domagk
Augustine does not disagree with this when he teaches that it is a faculty of the reason and the will to choose good with the assistance of grace; evil, when grace is absent. – John Calvin
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. – Joseph Conrad
Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance. – John Henry Newman
Any time you stop looking at evil as a black and white thing, it’s helpful. So the fact that there won’t be any obligatory Islamic terrorist stereotypes in movies any more, that’d be helpful. – John Cusack
When I was reporting crime… I never had the sense of clockwork conspiracies or some kind of imposing order of evil. What I sensed was things just sort of falling apart. – John Sandford
I don’t believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots. – Isak Dinesen
Al Jazeera aired a new tape of Osama bin Laden. It was the usual stuff, he called Bush evil, the Great Satan, called him a war monger. Basically, the same thing you heard at last night’s Democratic debate. – Jay Leno
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury. – John Stuart Mill
I can understand better than most the contradiction between the idealistic civilisation and religious morals of Europe and what they did with the slaves, because the root of the evil is only two generations away from me. Maybe this has fed my need to fight against the abuses of modern civilisation. – J. M. G. Le Clezio
That’s my sense of how crime works: that it’s not any kind of calculated evil driven by the devil, but just control disintegrating. – John Sandford
Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature. – John Berger
What people adore about superhero movies is the signal quality of the Christopher Nolan films – their complete lack of irony when it comes to the portrayal of heroism and the need for heroes to confront evil. – John Podhoretz
When I’m in the U.K. I can’t resist Maltesers and Twiglets – the evil combination. Luckily, I live in the U.S. so can’t get them easily, which is probably a good thing. – Jane Seymour
We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals. No, I refuse to pretend the problem is insufficient knowledge. We lack the theological will to do it. – Jonathan Kozol
Evil is a source of moral intelligence in the sense that we need to learn from our shadow, from our dark side, in order to be good. – John Bradshaw
I define a ‘good person’ as somebody who is fully conscious of their own limitations. They know their strengths, but they also know their ‘shadow’ – they know their weaknesses. In other words, they understand that there is no good without bad. Good and evil are really one, but we have broken them up in our consciousness. We polarize them. – John Bradshaw
Kids love to be scared; we all do. But there’s a difference between leaving them hanging out there, with their fears, and then bringing them safely home. Kids love it when someone like them stands up against real evil, something really horrendous and frightening, and win. – Henry Selick
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by providence as an evil to mankind. – Jonathan Swift