Many people equate the word 'daemon' with the word 'demon', implying some kind of Satanic connection between Unix and the underworld. This is an egregious misunderstanding. 'Daemon' is actually a much older form of 'demon'; daemons have no particular bias towards good or evil, but rather serve to help define a person's character or personality. The ancient Greeks' concept of a 'personal daemon' was similar to the modern concept of a 'guardian angel' – 'eudaemonia' is the state of being helped or protected by a kindly spirit. As a rule, Unix systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons.

And when I say the world is governed by nothing but demons, who will continue to be demons until they have destroyed the world, I am not using profanities; on the contrary, demon is a scientific term, a formula covering a specific chemical composition without connotations from politics, religion, or moral philosophy . . . . Here among us on the lowest rung of the world of life, no attention is paid to books unless they are written by chemically analyzed demons, or at least for them. Poets and philosophers are respected in proportion to the contempt and disgust they feel for the creation of life. Give this day our daily war is the prayer of those who govern countries. Kill, kill, said the outlaw Skuggasveinn . . .

These beings have also been called 'not divine' (a-deva) and 'not human' (a-miin~a), which shows that they were something between men and gods, i.e., they were demons.

What allows us to be human is something daemonic.

"daemon (dēm n) — A computer program that runs continuously in the background and performs specified operations at predefined times or in response to certain events. Condensed from "Disk and Execution MONitor

In their work of deception towards man, demons behave like skilled trasformisti, like skilled magicians, producing spectacular events and surprising things that are actually tricks.

That the gods superintend all the affairs of men, and that there are such beings as dæmons.

For the demons do all things — they prate, they confuse, they dissemble, they confound — to deceive the simple.

If demons existed, they would be the work of God; but would it he just on the part of God to have created beings condemned eternally to evil and to misery? If demons exist, it is in your low world, and in other worlds of similar degree that they are to be found. They are the human hypocrites who represent a just God as being cruel and vindictive, and who imagine that they make themselves agreeable to Him by the abominations they commit in His name.

Demons cannot know the future.

Demons control all kinds of religions.

Monsters and demons are metaphors for the dark side of human nature. The irrational. The fanatical. The animal.

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.

A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out; something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of nightghasts, not the waking world of sense.