From these beginnings, as it were, have issued bitterness, contentious obstinancy, lack of amenity, hasty judgement, anger, and an intense desire for revenge—to say nothing of headstrong will; that which many damn, by word at least, was my delight.

She came into the world fierce and stubborn and then she learned to hate.

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

What suckling craved the creature, born full-fanged?

Self-discontent, that is the venom that feeds malice. (p147)

There is something in meanness which excites a species of resentment that never subsides, and something in cruelty which stirs up the heart to the highest agony of human hatred.

I was filled with poison, but blessed with beauty and rage

He was a ferocious man. He had been ill-made in the making. He had not been born right, and he had not been helped any by the molding he had received at the hands of society. The hands of society are harsh, and this man was a striking sample of its handiwork. He was a beast - a human beast, it is true, but nevertheless so terrible a beast that he can best be characterized as carnivorous.

Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being helpless prey to impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, drops him, promises and betrays, and -crowning injury- inflicts on him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself.

To get up in the morning, in the fullness of youth, and open a book — now that’s what I call vicious!

He decided in favor of life out of sheer spite and malice.

That child of earth too, the inhabitant of Cilician caves, hostile, monstrous, with a hundred heads — I saw and pitied him as he was violently overcome, Typhon furious for war, who stood against all the gods, hissing terror with dreadful jaws, and who flashed a fierce gleam from his eyes, intent on the violent ruin of tyranny. Zeus’ unsleeping bolt came to him, however, the lightning which descends in a blast of flame; it hit him out of his lofty boastings; he was struck to the very soul of his being, blazing like a coal, and his strength blasted from him in thunder.

An unforgiving eye, and a damned disinheriting countenance.

He was not for that moment a human being, but a frenzied creature possessed by rage, turned into an animal. All that could be seen in him was the urge to hurt, and it was, as it will always be, the most dreadful sight in the world.