Your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous

Life without meaning, hope, and love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook that destroys the individual and others.

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

Hunger for vengeance poisoned the soul.

I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.

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.

Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself.

All cruelty springs from weakness

This swallowing up of life in nothingness, this obliteration of life by nothingness is what the emotion of malice ultimately desires. The eternal conflict between love and malice is the eternal contest between life and death. And this contest is what the complex vision reveals, as it moves from darkness to darkness.

Who shall count up the evil brood that is born from power - the pitiful fear, the madness, the despair, the overpowering craving for revenge, the treachery, the unmeasured cruelty?

Envy, bitter envy, was permeating his soul drop by drop, like a poison that tainted all his pleasures and made his life hateful.

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.

Cruelty is a tyrant that's always attended with fear

Cowardice was undoubtedly one of the most terrible vices - thus spoke Yeshua Ha-Nozri. 'No, philosopher, I disagree with you: it is the most terrible vice!'