Skip to content

Hate Quotes

Shakespeare, Byron, Benjamin Franklin, Jesus and Audre Lorde lead. The best-sourced lines are King’s, from Strength to Love (1963), that hatred paralyzes life and love releases it, and Rousseau’s, from the Confessions, that hatred, like love, renders its votaries credulous. Samuel Butler’s notebooks, published in 1912, have the most cynical entry: it does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something.

Two entries are flagged as disputed. “Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed” is credited to Bertrand Russell. “I don’t have prejudice, I hate everyone equally” is credited to H. L. Mencken.

Random quote on Hate

Most quoted on hate:

How like a fawning publican he looks!
I hate him for he is a Christian,
But more for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.

William Shakespeare

Is it possible to understand what God's love means for the oppressed without making wrath an essential ingredient of that love? What could love possibly mean in a racist society except the righteous condemnation of everything racist? Most theological treatments of God's love fail to place the proper emphasis on God's wrath, suggesting that love is completely self-giving without any demand for obedience.

James H. Cone A Black Theology of Liberation (1970)

If we should classify one by one all those who hate others and injure others, should we find them to be universal in love or partial? Of course we should say they are partial. Now, since partiality against one another is the cause of the major calamities in the empire, then partiality is wrong.

Mozi

In cases of defence 'tis best to weigh
The enemy more mighty than he seems;
So the proportions of defence are fill'd;
Which of a weak and niggardly projection
Doth, like a miser, spoil his coat with scanting
A little cloth.

William Shakespeare Henry V (1599)

My hate is general, I detest all men;
Some because they are wicked and do evil,
Others because they tolerate the wicked,
Refusing them the active vigorous scorn
Which vice should stimulate in virtuous minds.

Molière The Misanthrope (1666)

Obi-Wan Kenobi: Luke! Don't give in to hate. That leads to the dark side.

Leigh Brackett

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.

Emma Goldman Anarchism and Other Essays (1910)

I do defy him, and I spit at him;
Call him a slanderous coward and a villain:
Which to maintain I would allow him odds,
And meet him, were I tied to run afoot
Even to the frozen ridges of the Alps.

William Shakespeare Richard II (1595)

The world situation today... is caused entirely by the widespread hatred in the world—hatred of people and of races, hatred of individuals and of those in power, or of influence, and hatred of ideas and of religious beliefs. Fundamentally, it is caused by the separative attitudes of all peoples and races who, down the centuries and also today, have hated each other and loved themselves.

Alice Bailey

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

Don Marquis The Volta Review (1934)

One may not give one's soul to a devil of hate — and remain forever scatheless.

Eugene O'Neill Days Without End (1933)

They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.

Boris Pasternak

If men could only know each other, they would never either idolize or hate.

Elbert Hubbard A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911)

Perfect love casteth out fear, the Bible says; but, to speak it reverently, so does perfect hate.

John Buchan Prester John (1910)

Flat or round, there has always been hate in the world.

Tanith Lee Night's Master (1978)

I hate the whole übermensch, superman temptation that pervades science fiction. I believe no protagonist should be so competent, so awe-inspiring, that a committee of 20 really hard-working, intelligent people couldn't do the same thing.

David Brin

It’s always easier to hate than to forgive, isn’t it?

Alastair Reynolds Pushing Ice (2005)

Hatred springs from uncertainty and fear.

Irene Levine Paull

Hate gave birth to the slang; Slang (‘argot’) exists not anymore.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Myself, I have never seen a bumper sticker saying "Hate if you Love Jesus", but I sometimes wonder why not. It would be a good slogan for the religious Right.

Simon Blackburn Think (1999)

Related topics