If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
It was important, Dumbledore said, to fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then could evil be kept at bay, though never quite eradicated.
The evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you are going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat. They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.
We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are.
Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.