“I’m wondering whose side I ought to be on. I’m getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good Le Chiffre. The Devil has a rotten time and I always like to be on the side of the underdog. We don’t give the poor chap a chance. There’s a Good Book about goodness and how to be good and so forth, but there’s no Evil Book about evil and how to be bad. The Devil has no prophets to write his Ten Commandments and no team of authors to write his biography. His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folk-lore about evil people. All we have is the living example of the people who are least good, or our own intuition.
‘So,’ continued Bond, warming to his argument, ‘Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.”

—  Ian Fleming , book Casino Royale

Source: Casino Royale (1953), Ch. 20 : The Nature Of Evil

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I’m wondering whose side I ought to be on. I’m getting very sorry for the Devil and his disciples such as the good Le C…" by Ian Fleming?
Ian Fleming photo
Ian Fleming 44
English author, journalist and naval intelligence officer 1908–1964

Related quotes

Helen Keller photo
John Milton photo
Walter Bagehot photo

“The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people who can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

[Morgan, Forrest, Shakespeare—the Man, published in the Prospective Review, July 1853, The works of Walter Bagehot, vol. 1, 1891, Hartford, Connecticut, Travelers Insurance Company, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101064786716;view=1up;seq=373, 265–266 of 255–302]
Shakespeare—the Man (1853)

Oscar Wilde photo

“Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Source: The Critic as Artist (1891), Part I

Joseph Stalin photo

“God is on your side? Is He a Conservative? The Devil's on my side, he's a good Communist.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Said to Winston Churchill in Tehran, November 1943, as quoted in Fallen Eagle: The Last Days of the Third Reich (1995) by Robin Cross, p. 21
Contemporary witnesses

Ilana Mercer photo
José Saramago photo

“God, the devil, good, evil, it's all in our heads, not in Heaven or Hell, which we also invented. We do not realize that, having invented God, we immediately became His slaves.”

José Saramago (1922–2010) Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature

Interview with "El País", 2009.

Gillian Flynn photo
Tzvetan Todorov photo

“A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found. We should struggle not against the devil himself but what allows the devil to live — Manichaean thinking itself.”

Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017) Bulgarian historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist and essayist

paraphrased variant:
We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.
Source: Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003), Ch. 5 : The Past in the Present, p. 195

Related topics