Evil Quotes

“The myth of pure evil depicts innocent victims fighting against gratuitously wicked, sadistic enemies. The myth encourages people to believe that they are good and will remain good no matter what, even if they perpetrate severe harm on their opponents. Thus, the myth of pure evil confers a kind of moral immunity on people who believe in it. As we will soon see, belief in the myth is itself one recipe for evil, because it allows people to justify violent and oppressive actions. It allows evil to masquerade as good.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil. Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“A central fact about evil is the discrepancy between the importance of the act to the perpetrator and to the victim. This can be called the magnitude gap. The importance of what takes place is almost always much greater for the victim than for the perpetrator. When trying to understand evil, one is always asking, "How could they do such a horrible thing?" But the horror is usually being measured in the victim's terms. To the perpetrator, it is often a very small thing. thing. As we saw earlier, perpetrators generally have less emotion about their acts than do victims. It is almost impossible to submit to rape, pillage, impoverishment, or possible murder without strong emotional reactions, but it is quite possible to perform those crimes without emotion.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“The reliance on judgments by others is essential. Indeed, if we limited our examination of evil to acts that perpetrators themselves acknowledge as evil, there would be hardly any such acts to examine.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“As a general pattern, suffering
stimulates a quest for meaningful explanation.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“The use of violent or oppressive means to solve problems is a common feature in both instrumental and idealistic evil. There is an important difference, however, and that is the extent to which the ends justify the means.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“Because of the importance of perceiving the means as morally acceptable, there may be a strong ongoing need for justification in idealistic evil. The person is doing something that would normally be regarded as wrong, such as killing or hurting people. Somehow, the person must sustain the belief that it is right. This is often done by focusing on the goodness of the overriding goal.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“A first conclusion was that the actions seemed much less evil—less wrong—to the perpetrators than to the victims.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“The myth of pure evil, then, is surprisingly durable and elastic. Even when each side provokes and antagonizes the other, the myth can be invoked. Ironically, the myth fails to acknowledge mutual provocation, but it appears that both sides in a conflict are quite capable of seeing themselves as innocent victims and the other as unreasonably, gratuitously wicked.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“Evil is but rarely found in the perpetrator's own selfimage. It is far more commonly found in the judgments of others.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“The goals of instrumental evil are generally acceptable ones, such as the desire to have money or power, but they are not normally endowed with sufficient moral force to make people think that it is right and good to use violent means. Idealism can make the methods seem right and good, or at least acceptable.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“Evil is not likely to result when people firmly believe that ends do not justify means. If they evaluate their methods by the same lofty standards by which they judge their goals and purposes, evil will be held in check.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“There is ample reason to question whether low self-esteem is to blame for violence. Think of the obnoxious, hostile, or bullying people you have known—were they humble, modest, and self-effacing? (That's mainly what low self-esteem is like.) Most of the aggressive people I have known were the opposite: conceited, arrogant, and often consumed with thoughts about how they were superior to everyone else.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“Just as serious modern literature does not have plain old bad guys, sophisticated movies may also avoid such stock figures.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“The magnitude gap is also reflected in different time perspectives. Oppression, violence, and cruelty fade much faster into the distant past for the perpetrator than for the victim.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“More recently, studies by social scientists have emphasized that most people in modern Western society go through life with strong positive beliefs that the world is basically a nice place in which to live, that life is mostly fair, and that they are good people who deserve to have good things happen to them. Moreover, these beliefs are a valuable aid to happy, healthy functioning. But suffering and victimization undermine these beliefs and make it hard to go on living happily or effectively in society. Indeed, the direct and practical effects of some trauma or crime are often relatively minor, whereas the psychological effects go on indefinitely. The body may recover from rape or robbery rather quickly, but the psychological scars can last for many years. A characteristic of these scars is that the victims lose faith in their basic beliefs about the world as fair and benevolent or even in themselves as good people. Thus, evil strikes at people's fundamental beliefs.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“the question of evil is a victim's question. Perpetrators, after all, do not need to search for explanations of what they have done. And bystanders are merely curious or sympathetic. It is the victims who are driven to ask, why did this happen?”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“the higher your opinion of yourself, the more likely you are to get ego threats, and hence the more prone to violence you would be.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“We can understand instrumental evil as the use of a particular set of means to pursue goals that, alternatively, might be pursued with acceptable means. The key question for understanding this form of evil then becomes: What makes people choose evil means rather than other, more acceptable ones?”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“The challenge of this book is to understand how perpetrators come to do things that others see as evil.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“Romantic jealousy is another experience in which people become irrationally oversensitive because of implicit blows to their pride.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“You do not have to give people reasons to be violent, because they already have plenty of reasons. All you have to do is take away their reasons to restrain themselves.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty

“Violent acts follow from high self-esteem, not from low self-esteem. This is true across a broad spectrum of violence, from playground bullying to national tyranny, from domestic abuse to genocide, from warfare to murder and rape. Perpetrators of violence are typically people who think very highly of themselves.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty