Evil - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

- Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed.

- H. P. Lovecraft, ''The Nameless City'' (1921)

What a world, what a world.Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?

- Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar AllanWoolf, TheWizard of Oz (film, 1939)

Gradually his mental picture of the world was transformed. No longer a world of material atoms and empty space, but a world in which the bodiless existed and moved according to its own obscure laws or unpredictable impulses. The new picture illumined with dreadful clarity certain general facts which had always bewildered and troubled him and from which he had tried to hide; the inevitability of hate and war, the diabolically timed mischances which wrecked the best of human intentions, the walls of willful misunderstanding that divided one man from another, the eternal vitality of cruelty and ignorance and greed.

- Fritz Leiber, ''Smoke Ghost'' (1941)

It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King (1955)

My evil self is at that door, and I have no power to stop it.

- Cyril Hume, Forbidden Planet (film, 1956)

There's so little meaning in Agronski's life as it is, it won't take Egtverchi long to cut him off from any contact with reality at all. That is what evil does - it empties you.

- James Blish, A Case of Conscience (1958)

''Some of you are bad and kill other kinds of life. Others of you are good and protect life.'' Thought I, is that all there is to good and bad?

- Cordwainer Smith, ''Alpha Ralpha Boulevard'' (1961)

Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.

- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

The greatness of evil lies in its awful accuracy.Without that deadly talent for being in the right place at the right time, evil must suffer defeat. For unlike its opposite, good, evil is allowed no human failings, no miscalculations. Evil must be perfect . . . or depend upon the imperfections of others.

- Joseph Stefano, ''Don't Open Till Doomsday,'' episode of The Outer Limits (1964)

How little the universe knows about the nature of real cruelty!

- Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they - all of them - had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man.

- Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer (1969)

The evil are always foolish in the final analysis.

- GeneWolfe, ''The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories'' (1970)

Were wise women always evil?

- KateWilhelm, ''The Encounter'' (1971)

A spider had spun a web, a circle delicately suspended. The silver threads caught the sunlight. In the center the spinner waited, a gray-black thing no larger than the pupil of an eye. [. . .] ''What is evil?'' asked the younger man. The round web, with its black center, seemed to watch them both. ''A web we men weave,'' Ged answered.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (1972)

Evil breaks the rules. Good must obey the rules. Very simple.

- Joanna Russ, ''Existence'' (1975)

There is no good and there is no evil, outside of what makes us happy and what makes us unhappy.

- Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)

If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you it will.

- Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, The Empire Strikes Back (film, 1980)

He was just a little villain. An old-fashioned craftsman, making crimes oneoff. The really unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, or anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present - they are real.

- Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honor (1986)

Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.

- Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead (1986)

Anyone who thinks he can draw a line between good and evil is at best mistaken, at worst demented.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)

Those whose office it is to debunk the supernatural are fond of pointing out that incidences of paranormal activity most often take place in backwaters and rarely in the presence of credible witnesses, claiming that this in itself is evidence of the fraudulent character of the phenomena involved, yet it has occurred to me that the agents of the supernatural, especially those elements whose activities are directed toward evil ends, might well exhibit reticence in appearing before persons capable of verifying their existence and thus their threat to humankind.

- Lucius Shepard, ''The Ends of the Earth'' (1989)