Quotes about monster (552 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Can you imagine how terrible it is when you've got everything and you're still desperately lonely? That is awful beyond words.
I'm so powerful on stage that I seem to have created a monster. When I'm performing I'm an extrovert, yet inside I'm a completely different man.”

Freddie Mercury (1946–1991) British singer, songwriter and record producer

As quoted in "Rock On Freddie" (1985).

Imagination

“We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

“I'm calm," Rachel insisted. "Every time I'm around you, some monsters attack us. What's to be nervous about?"
"Look," I said. "I'm sorry about the band room. I hope they didn't kick you our or anything."
"Nah. They asked me a lot of questions about you. I played dumb."
"Was it hard?" Annabeth asked.”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Hope , Question , Time

“How good and thoughtful he is; the world seems full of good men--even if there are monsters in it.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Variant: The world seems full of good men, even if there are monsters in it.
Source: Dracula

Men , World

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)

Thinking , Memory , Forgetting

Stephie Pahlavi Zan

Childhood , Personality , Forgetting , Pain

“I was becoming the cold, emotionally crippled monster I always wanted to be, and I wasn’t so sure I liked it. But it was too late. The metamorphosis was already well under way.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

Source: The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

Way

“People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”

Andrzej Sapkowski book The Last Wish

Source: The Last Wish (1993)

People , Feeling , Thinking , Cheating

“He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

World , Past , Future , Sea

“People like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves.”

Andrzej Sapkowski book The Last Wish

Geralt
Source: The Last Wish (1993)
Context: “People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”

People

“The real world is where the monsters are.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

World

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[, July 5, 1922]”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

“Who hasn't asked oneself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?”

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) Brazilian writer

The Hour of the Star (1977)
Source: A Hora Da Estrela

“It came charging toward me, several hundred pounds of angry-looking monster, and I did the only thing any reasonable wizard could have done.
I turned around and ran like hell.”

Jim Butcher book Death Masks

Source: Death Masks

Hell

“The problem, of course, was that turning into a monster was the brighter of my two choices. Choice Number 1: I turn into a vampyre, which equals a monster in just about any human’s mind. Choice Number 2: My body rejects the Change and I die. Forever.

So the good news is that I wouldn’t have to take the geometry test tomorrow.”

Kristin Cast book Marked

Source: Marked

Problem , Change

“Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

Men

“The city, that monster with a hundred mouths and a thousand ears, a monster that knows nothing but says everything, had written me off.”

Jean-Dominique Bauby book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death), trans. Jeremy Leggatt (Vintage, 1998, ISBN 0-375-70121-4), p. 82

“But then I ask myself, I have never truly known the man whose flank I have led one difficult and ascetic life for. Perhaps he has played with my idealism, taking advantage for dark scopes that he has held hidden within himself. How can I expect to know a man who has never opened his heart to me? Till now, I do not know what he really thought, knew or wanted. I was alone with my thoughts and my suspicions. And now, the veil that covered this statue has fallen to the ground and instead of an art work, a monster has revealed itself. Now we leave to the historians of the future the task of discussing if that statue was therefore a sin from the beginning, or was changed because of the circumstances. I continue to make the same error: I try to think back to his humble origins. But then I remember how many sons of these people have sealed their history with his name.”

Alfred Jodl (1890–1946) German general

About Hitler, Nuremberg Trial, March 10, 1946. Quoted in "Hitler: The Man and the Military Leader" by Percy Ernst Schramm.

Life , People , Art , Error

“Though I have always made it my practice to be pleasant to everybody, I have not once actually experienced friendship. I have only the most painful recollections of my various acquaintances with the exception of such companions in pleasure as Horiki. I have frantically played the clown in order to disentangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result. Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy. I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. (I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings really possess this faculty.) It was hardly to be expected that someone like myself could ever develop any close friends—besides, I lacked even the ability to pay visits. The front door of another person’s house terrified me more than the gate of Inferno in the Divine Comedy, and I am not exaggerating when I say that I really felt I could detect within the door the presence of a horrible dragon-like monster writhing there with a dank, raw smell.”

Osamu Dazai book No Longer Human

The Third Notebook: Part One
No Longer Human

Love , Pain , Friendship , People

“It's art, just look at it as art. Yeah, it's disgusting, but that's never gonna happen. Go to the Vatican and look at some of the artwork there. Woah! That's real, representing something that could happen. Monsters are never gonna come ripping out of your body.”

George Fisher (musician) (1970) vocalist for Cannibal Corpse

Discussing the Cannibal Corpse's usually gory album cover art, specifically "The Wretched Spawn"'s cover art in Metal: A Headbanger's Journey.

Art

“The sea is calm you said. Peaceful. Calm above, but below a world of gliding monsters preying on their fellows. Murderers, all of them. Only the strongest teeth survive. And who's to tell me it's any different here on board, or yonder on dry land.”

Peter Ustinov (1921–2004) English actor, writer, and dramatist

Master At Arms Claggert
Billy Budd (1962)

World , Peace , Sea

“If you are not capable of cruelty, then you are absolutely a victim of anyone who is. For those who are exceedingly agreeable, there is a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them, which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect, because it is impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth. And if you grow teeth, you realize that you're somewhat dangerous, or seriously dangerous. Then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and that other people do the same thing. That doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel. What it means is that being able to be cruel, and then not being cruel, is better than not being able to be cruel, because in the first case you're nothing but weak and naive, and in the second case you're dangerous but you have it under control. If you're competent at fighting, it actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight, because when someone pushes you you'll be able to respond with confidence, and with any luck a reasonable show of confidence, which is a show of dominance, will be enough to make the bully back off.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLc_MC7NQek&t=0s "2017 Personality 04/05: Heroic and Shamanic Initiations"

People , Confidence , Fight , Parting

“Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up all the vacuities of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge.”

Horace Mann (1796–1859) American politician

Congressional speech (1849)
Context: I affirm, in words as true and literal as any that belong to geometry, that the man who withholds knowledge from a child not only works diabolical miracles for the destruction of good, but for the creation of evil also. He who shuts out truth, by the same act opens the door to all the error that supplies its place. Ignorance breeds monsters to fill up all the vacuities of the soul that are unoccupied by the verities of knowledge. He who dethrones the idea of law, bids chaos welcome in its stead. Superstition is the mathematical complement of religious truth; and just so much less as the life of a human being is reclaimed to good, just so much more is it delivered over to evil. The man or the institution, therefore, that withholds knowledge from a child, or from a race of children, exercises the awful power of changing the world in which they are to live, just as much as though he should annihilate all that is most lovely and grand in this planet of ours, or transport the victim of his cruelty to some dark and frigid zone of the universe, where the sweets of knowledge are unknown, and the terrors of ignorance hold their undisputed and remorseless reign.

Soul , Knowledge

“What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality! The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden (1952)

Women , Men , Freedom

“The only monsters I have ever known were men.”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

Source: The Storyteller

Men

“Rumour is a pipe
Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wavering multitude,
Can play upon it.”

William Shakespeare Henry IV, Part 2

Source: Henry IV, Part 2

Jealousy

“Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win.”

Stephen King book The Shining

Source: The Shining (1977)

Depressing , Heart Touching

“New lesson, class. Most monsters will vaporize when sliced with a celestial bronze sword. This change is perfectly normal, and will happen to you right now if you don't BACK OFF!" - Percy”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Change

“Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.”

Stephen King book It

Variant: And almost idly, in a kind of sidethought, Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Source: It (1986)

Truth , Childhood

“Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

“Never met such a Gorgon… I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Source: The Importance of Being Earnest

“Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!"

Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures In Wonderland And Through The Looking Glass

“So you're a Shadowhunter,' Nate said. 'De Quincey told me that you lot were monsters.'
'Was that before or after he tried to eat you?' Will inquired.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

“… throw roses into the abyss and say: 'here is my thanks to the monster who didn't succeed in swallowing me alive.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“Some loves have to be given up, others have to be forgotten. Strange as it may sound, if you think of me as a monster, but I can love most passionately. I do not think of myself as evil.”

Christopher Pike book The Last Vampire

Source: The Last Vampire

Love , Thinking , Passion , Evil

“And we all know love is a glass which makes even a monster appear fascinating.”

Alberto Moravia book The Woman of Rome

Source: The Woman of Rome

Love , Appearance

“Being a detective isn't all about torture and murder and monsters. Sometimes it gets truly unpleasant… The fate of the world may depend on whether or not you can bring yourself to visit your relatives.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Fate , World , Dependency

“When everyone is determined to present someone as a monster, there are two possibilities: either he’s a saint or they themselves are not telling the whole story.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

“There's a monster in our wood. She'll get you if you're not good. Drag you under leaves and sticks. Punish you for all your tricks. Anest of hair and gnawed bone. You are never, ever coming… home.”

Holly Black book The Darkest Part of the Forest

Source: The Darkest Part of the Forest

Home

“Inside each of us is a monster; inside each of us is a saint. The real question is which one we nurture the most, which one will smite the other.”

Jodi Picoult book The Storyteller

Source: The Storyteller

Question

“Children can have a cruel, absolute sense of justice. Children can kill monsters and feel quite proud of themselves.”

Holly Black book The Darkest Part of the Forest

Source: The Darkest Part of the Forest

Children , Justice , Feeling , Sense

“What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

Source: Pensées

Truth , Error , Universe

“I'll just have them change the entry in the demonology textbook from 'almost extinct' to 'not extinct enough for Alec. He prefers his monsters really, really extinct.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Will that make you happy?"
Jace to Alec, pg. 10
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

Change

“The monsters of the mind are far worse than those that actually exist.”

Christopher Paolini book Brisingr

Source: Brisingr

“People tell their children there are no monsters in the world. They tell them that because they believe it, or they want the child to feel safe. But there are monsters, Luke, all the more frightening because they look like people.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Honest Illusions

Children , People , World , Feeling

“Will looked horrified. "What kind of monster could possibly hate chocolate?”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Hate

“Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.”

William Shakespeare Othello

Source: Othello

Jealousy

“I'm a monster, not a moron.”

P. C. Cast book Hunted

Source: Hunted

“The person who fights monsters should make sure that in the process, he does not become a monster himself. Because when you stare down at an abyss, the abyss stares back at you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Variant: Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Fight , Personality

“Man cries, his tears dry up and run out. So he becomes a devil, reduced to a monster.”

Kohta Hirano (1973) Japanese manga artist

Tear

“We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.”

Douglas Preston (1956) American author

Source: The Monster of Florence

“Yeah, I was run out of town. They chased me up to the castle of Aberdeen with torches. Just like the Frankenstein monster. And I got away in a hot air balloon. And I came here to Seattle.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

As quoted in Monk Magazine (1992-10).
Interviews (1989-1994), Print

“"Mashups […] nobody's going to listen to mashups in another ten years. Mashups are novelty music. They're like "The Monster Mash." They have no musical staying power. You're pursuing a phantom there. It's bad music, I mean, it's not bad— it's a pastiche, it's like magazine collage— which can be good for what it is. But to pretend that that's like tremendous creative work— No! It's a tremendous creative power— and it can have a tremendous audience, but it's not tremendously good. And we need a little bit of aesthetic honesty in confronting things like this. Just because it's new, and people with laptops can do it, and get away with it, and find an audience for it, does not make it a real cultural advance. It's an epiphenomenon."”

Bruce Sterling (1954) American writer, speaker, futurist, and design instructor

in SXSW 2007  Bruce Sterling Rant (2007).

People , Music

“Deep down, I don't create anything. I'm just someone who simply lifts a rock and exposes what's beneath it. It's not my fault that monsters come out some times.”

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

Eu, no fundo, não invento nada. Sou apenas alguém que se limita a levantar uma pedra e a pôr à vista o que está por baixo. Não é minha culpa se de vez em quando me saem monstros.
Quoted in the article Literatura: Saramago doutor honoris causa da Universidade Autónoma Madrid. Published by Rádio Mirasado. (March 15th, 2007)

Time

“To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

Source: Pensées Philosophiques (1746), Ch. 5, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker

Love , Feeling , Passion

“The symbolic act of the death of the father is absolutely necessary, but it is also necessary to do it in an intelligent way, with lucidity and without resentment. If you perceive your father in a violent way, it is because you are not killing him: you are asking him to love you because you need it. But if you are able to see him positively, without his pedestal and without your fear, you are no longer begging him to love you in order for you to exist. And this is when you kill him, when you make him fall. But once you've knocked him down, it is necessary to rebuild him and repay him, because fathers have essential value, even if they are monsters: they give us life, they leave their imprint on certain parts of our being, and they allow us to become who we are in a conscious way.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky (1929) Filmmaker and comics writer

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)

Love , Life , Death , Fear

“The rigid electron is in my view a monster in relation to Maxwell's equations, whose innermost harmony is the principle of relativity.”

Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909) German mathematician and physicist

as quoted by Dennis Overbye, Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance (2001)

“Yes, I was a funny guy for a long time. When I started out, I just wanted to write humor. I wrote humor for kids. My very first book was called How to be Funny. It was about how to get big laughs at the dinner table and how to get laughs in school. Parents hated this book. I wrote joke books, like A Hundred and One Monster Jokes, and other joke books for years. I did maybe a hundred of them. I had a great time, and I did this humor magazine called Bananas for ten years. It was sort of Mad Magazine, but it was all in color, and it was great. That was all I ever wanted to do. I couldn't believe it. When that ended, I figured I would just coast for the rest of my career. That was it. I'd already done what I wanted to do. I had no idea what was coming up.”

R.L. Stine (1943) American writer and producer

Reading Rockets interview http://www.readingrockets.org/books/interviews/stine/transcript hi you know it’s me cardi B

Hate , Books , School , Color

“We want to be clearly understood on this point. We are not trying to say that signs and rites are a big piece of humbug. They would be such if people did not need them; but we have to recognize that everyone has not the same degree of intelligence. Children have always had fairy stories told to them, and these stories will continue to be told as long as there are nurses and mothers. Children have faith and this is what saves them. Imagine a child of seven saying: 'I do not want to accept anything I cannot understand.' What could one teach such a monster? Accept what your teachers tell you to begin with, my fine fellow, then study it and, if you are not an idiot, you will understand it by-and-by.”

Eliphas Levi (1810–1875) French writer

Book Two: The Royal Mystery or the Art of Subduing the Powers, Chapter XI: The Arcana of Solomon's Ring
The Great Secret: or Occultism Unveiled

Children , People , Faith , Imagination

“Perseus wore a magic cap that the monsters he hunted down might not see him.
We draw the magic cap down over eyes and ears as a make-believe that there are no monsters.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Author's prefaces to the First Edition.
(Buch I) (1867)

Drawing

“As to the Court's invocation of the Lemon test: Like some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad, after being repeatedly killed and buried, Lemon stalks our Establishment Clause jurisprudence once again, frightening the little children and school attorneys of Center Moriches Union Free School District. Its most recent burial, only last Term, was, to be sure, not fully six feet under: Our decision in Lee v. Weisman conspicuously avoided using the supposed test but also declined the invitation to repudiate it. Over the years, however, no fewer than five of the currently sitting Justices have, in their own opinions, personally driven pencils through the creature's heart (the author of today's opinion repeatedly), and a sixth has joined an opinion doing so. The secret of the Lemon test's survival, I think, is that it is so easy to kill. It is there to scare us (and our audience) when we wish it to do so, but we can command it to return to the tomb at will. Such a docile and useful monster is worth keeping around, at least in a somnolent state; one never knows when one might need him.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Lamb's Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, 508 U.S. 384, 398-99 (1993) (concurring) (citations omitted).
1990s

Children , Secret , School , Justice

“Those who chose not to empathize enable real monsters; for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it through our own apathy.”

Joanne K. Rowling (1965) British novelist, author of the Harry Potter series

Harvard address (2008)

Evil

“It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Unfaithfulness , Disease , Imagination

“For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Black Cat

The Black Cat (1843)

“The monster slept at Grenoble.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Le Moniteur Universel, March 12, 1815.
About

“It delights me even more, though, to hear that my nameless cosmic monsters have an air of originality about them! Shapeless, unheard-of creatures are not original with me; for although Poe did not use them, they figure quite widely in minor horror-writing since his time. Usually they tend to be exaggerations of certain known life-forms such as insects, poisonous plants, protozoa, & the like, although a few writers break away wholly from terrestrial analogy & depict things as abstractly cosmic as luminous protoplasmic globes. If I have gone beyond these, it is only subtly & atmospherically—in details, & in occasional imputations of geometrical, biological, & physico-chemical properties definitely outside the realm of matter as understood by us. Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic—the abnormally chromatic entity in The Colour Out of Space being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Elizabeth Toldridge (8 March 1929), in Selected Letters II, 1925-1929 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 316
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life , Sense , Time

“The whole point of what I do-the Monster Ball, the music, the performance art aspect of it-I want to create a space for my fans where they can feel free and where they can celebrate because I didn't fit in in high school and I felt like a freak. So I like to create this atmosphere for my fans where they feel like they have a freak in me to hang with and they don't feel alone.”

Lady Gaga (1986) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Lady Gaga in an interview with Ellen DeGeneres http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g891E2aczys

School , Art , Music , Feeling

“Why has this silly engine suddenly turned up, which is so idiotically welded together? They told me then, there would be two engines connected behind each other, and suddenly there appears this misbegotten monster of welded-together engines one cannot get at!”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

Comment by Goering to a report submitted to him by Oberst Edgar Petersen, the Kommandeur der Erprobungsstellen (commander of German military aircraft test facilties in the Third Reich) on August 13 1942, regarding the usage and deficient installation design for the trouble-prone, complex Daimler-Benz DB 606 "power system" powerplants for the He 177A, Nazi Germany's only operational heavy bomber, which was suffering from an unending series of engine fires.
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)
Source: [Heinkel He 177-277-274, Manfred, Griehl, Joachim, Dressel, Airlife Publishing, Shrewsbury, UK, 1998, 52, October 28, 2012]

Appearance

“It is very difficult to do one's duty. I was considered a barbarian because at the storming of the Praga 7,000 people were killed. Europe says that I am a monster. I myself have read this in the papers, but I would have liked to talk to people about this and ask them: is it not better to finish a war with the death of 7,000 people rather than to drag it on and kill 100,000.”

Alexander Suvorov (1730–1800) Russian military commander

About the Polish deaths in the storming of the fortified Praga suburb in Warsaw on October 15, 1794, during the Polish revolt, quotes in Philip Longworth, "The Art of Victory", 1966.

Death , War , People , Reading

“If at least, time enough were alloted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through — between which so many days have ranged themselves — they stand like giants immersed in Time.”

Marcel Proust book In Search of Lost Time

Final lines, Ch. III : An afternoon party at the house of the Princesse de Guermantes"; translation by Stephen Hudson, Time Regained (1931)
If enough time was left to me to complete my work, my first concern would be to describe the people in it, even at the risk of making them seem colossal and unnatural creatures, as occupying a place far larger than the very limited one reserved for them in space, a place in fact almost infinitely extended, since they are in simultaneous contact, like giants immersed in the years, with such distant periods of their lives, between which so many days have taken up their place – in Time.
Translation by Ian Patterson, Finding Time Again (2002)
In Search of Lost Time, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927), Vol. VII: The Past Recaptured (1927)

Men , Idea , Distant , Time

“The Social-Democratic leaders glossed over and concealed from the masses the true class nature of fascism, and did not call them to the struggle against the increasingly reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie. They bear great historical responsibility for the fact that, at the decisive moment of the fascist offensive, a large section of the working people of Germany and of a number of other fascist countries failed to recognize in fascism the most bloodthirsty monster of finance capital, their most vicious enemy, and that these masses were not prepared to resist it.”

Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949) Bulgarian politician

Source: The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the Communist International in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism, Ch. 1.

People , Nature , Decision , Country

“State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people’.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus Spoke Zarathustra; A Book for All and None, trans. Kaufmann, New York: NY, Modern Library (1995) p. 48, 1.11: “On the New Idol”

People , Lie

“We started out — at least my intent was to, in a sense — address all of the so-called neighboring gangs in the area and to put, in a sense — I thought I can cleanse the neighborhood of all these, you know, marauding gangs. But I was totally wrong. And eventually, we morphed into the monster we were addressing.”

Stanley Tookie Williams (1953–2005) American criminal

Democracy Now! interview (2005)

Sense

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Aphorism 146 from Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) an 1886 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Translated from: Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

Source: Gutenberg-DE

Translation source: Hollingdale
Misattributed

Fight

“Those of use who are, who have been so much influenced by violence in the media, in particular pornographic violence, are not some kinds of inherent monsters. We are your sons and we are your husbands. And we grew up in regular families. And pornography can reach out and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home twenty, thirty years ago.”

Ted Bundy (1946–1989) American serial killer

1989 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LYL1PTrtXo with James Dobson

Family , Home , Housing

“What was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

The monster in Ch. 13
Frankenstein (1818)
Context: What was I? Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?
I cannot describe to you the agony that these reflections inflicted upon me; I tried to dispel them, but sorrow only increased with knowledge. Oh, that I had forever remained in my native wood, nor known nor felt beyond the sensations of hunger, thirst, and heat!

Men , Money , Nature

“... I have said for twenty-five or thirty years that the one thing I would really like to know before I die is why the monster group exists.”

John Horton Conway (1937) British mathematician

[Life, Death and the Monster - Numberphile, 9 May 2014, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOCe5HUObD4]

“I'm a problem that'll never ever be solved I'm a monster, I'm a maven
I know this world is changing
Never gave in, never gave up
I'm the only thing I'm afraid of
No matter what, you'll never take that from me
My reign is as far as your eyes can see, it's amazing.”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

Amazing
Lyrics, 808s & Heartbreak (2008)

Problem , World , Change

“Remember that I’m still a monster. I can listen to you scream and cry and beg and I still won’t let you out.”

Holly Black book The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Source: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

Cry

“Foolish Ever, don't you realize there's no longer any difference between you and your-monster? You are the monster. It's your dark side, your shadow self, and you've now joined as one.”

Alyson Nöel book Dark Flame

Source: Dark Flame

“Best way to save humanity is to turn the monsters against one another.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: UnDivided

Way

“… to all the monsters in my nursery: May you never leave me alone.”

Guillermo del Toro The Strain Trilogy

Source: The Strain

“Percy hated tests. Since he'd lost his memory, his whole life was one big fill-in-the-blank. He was _____, from _____. He felt like _____, and if the monsters caught him, he'd be _____.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Variant: Since Percy’d lost his memory, his whole life was one big fillin-the-blank. He was____________________, from____________________. He felt like
____________________, and if the monsters
caught him, he’d be____________________.
Source: The Son of Neptune

Life , Hate , Memory

“Are you guys busy?" Juniper asked.
"Well," I said, "we're in the middle of this game against a bunch of monsters and we're trying not to die."
"We're not busy," Annabeth said.”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Variant: Juniper: Are you guys busy?
Percy: Well, we’re in the middle of this game against a bunch of monsters and we’re trying not to die.
Annabeth: We’re not busy.
Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Guy , Game , Business