Top 89 Antagonist Quotes
#1. This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.
Barbara Deming
#2. It's one thing to not want an evil-sorcerer type villain in your story, but it's another thing to avoid having any sort of antagonist at all. A story without an antagonist gets weird pretty quick.
Patrick Rothfuss
#3. I'm a filmmaker, and I was most influenced by Hitchcock's films. How he could plant such deep enriched characters and then make us care both about the antagonist and protagonist was masterful.
Paul Haggis
#4. The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.
Isaac D'Israeli
#5. It is not like the white Republican, the conservative, who clears it up for you and says, "I don't like you", to your face and then you know immediately he is an antagonist. Racism operates in a lot of ways, and so I live it every day.
Bocafloja
#6. It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.
Michelle Richmond
#8. To fear is to have more faith in your antagonist than in Christ.
D.L. Moody
#9. The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate; he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him.
William Hazlitt
#10. A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.
Joseph Addison
#11. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure; all take their turns of retardation ... .Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance, said Sib, was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualities.
Helen DeWitt
#12. On the aesthetic level, decolonized music presents itself as a direct antagonist to the traditional values promoted by the culture industry.
Bocafloja
#13. Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business is Ralph Nader, who - thanks largely to the media - has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.
Lewis F. Powell Jr.
#14. Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.
Philip K. Dick
#15. Have you ever had the feeling that you aren't the main character in the story of your life? That you fill a more minor role- supporting cast, maybe, comic relief, or even antagonist.
Elana K. Arnold
#16. People come up to me and say, 'You are such a great bad guy.' The fact is that the antagonist in a movie is usually the most fun to play. You can stretch the role and do so much with it.
Robert Z'Dar
#17. Science ... in other words, knowledge-is not the enemy of religion; for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance. But it is often the antagonist of school-divinity.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
#18. Envy is the antagonist of the fortunate.
Epictetus
#19. Observe, Chagatai, the protagonist of every work of fiction is Humanity, and the antagonist is God.
Ada Palmer
#20. I just want to be a part of great stories, whether I'm part of an amazing ensemble cast or I'm leading it or the antagonist or whatever.
Zoe Saldana
#21. Self-love is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.
Thomas Jefferson
#22. You don't really understand an antagonist until you understand why he's a protagonist in his own version of the world.
John Rogers
#23. The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
Annie Besant
#24. Donna Mills came on the show as a female antagonist, about a year before, so now they wanted to have a male antagonist. I was cast as a Senator to shake things up.
William Devane
#25. It is a frequent vice of radical polemic to assert, and even to believe, that once you have found the lowest motive for an antagonist, you have identified the correct one.
Christopher Hitchens
#26. Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous.
Cheyenne Jackson
#27. Where you have a villain in the piece or the antagonist, whatever you want to call them, there has to be humanity at the core of it or it's faintly ridiculous. Nobody is just villain through and through. You have to feel something for them.
Scott Hicks
#28. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
Edmund Burke
#29. Difficulties show men what they are.
In case of any difficulty,
remember that God has pitted you
against a rough antagonist
that you may be a conqueror,
and this cannot be without toil.
Epictetus
#30. Johnny Ringo to me was just the best antagonist that I've ever played, because I played him as a guy who has a death wish and had done everything that he wanted in life. As far as he was concerned, a gun fight was about as exciting as it was going to get.
Michael Biehn
#31. I think, at the end of the day, the real antagonist is the brokenness of humanity.
LeCrae
#32. Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.
Doris Lessing
#33. We honor revelation too highly to make it the antagonist of reason, or to believe that it calls us to renounce our highest powers.
William Ellery Channing
#34. All wicked are antagonist but all antagonist are not all wicked.
Ikechukwu Joseph
#35. He who has a slight disadvantage plays more attentively, inventively and more boldly than his antagonist who either takes it easy or aspires after too much. Thus a slight disadvantage is very frequently seen to convert into a good, solid advantage.
Emanuel Lasker
#36. Your malice and your striving to seek revenge are much more harmful to your health than they are to your antagonist.
Aaidh Ibn Abdullah Al-Qarni
#37. To annoy or piss off are light offences. I'd say if you abuse the goodness of a novelist or a writer, the truth is, he or she can kill you multiple times or cannibalise you in many antagonist characters.
Angelica Hopes
#38. Mais c'est renfantillage - this is childishness!' we heard de Grandin pant as we closed in and sought a chance to seize his skeleton-like antagonist. 'He who fights an imp of Satan as if he were human is a fool!'
("The Man In Crescent Terrace")
Seabury Quinn
#39. Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error.
Thomas Jefferson
#40. No, indeed, I shall grant you nothing. I always take the part of my own sex. I do indeed. I give you notice
You will find me a formidable antagonist on that point. I always stand up for women.
Jane Austen
#41. A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.
David Mamet
#42. When you have a nightmare, don't let it control you. Try transforming that fear into into an antagonist to release pent-up feelings.
B.A. Gabrielle
#45. I miss having a villain. Whether we realize it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favoring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act. Nothing arouses a passion for dogma more than a good antagonist. And the more unlikely the better.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#46. In matching your wits against yourself you take on the shrewdest and wiliest antagonist you can have, and consequently a victorious outcome in this duel of wits brings a great feeling of triumph.
Dorothea Brande
#47. I mean, without the antagonist, there would be no story! It'd be like: 'Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to be loved, so she met a prince and got married and lived Happily Ever After, The End'? That's not a story; that's a bumper sticker.
Shannon Hale
#48. Sex as the vital antagonist to death - isn't the orgasm the primal spark of life? I know of many instances in which sexual feelings arise in order to neutralize fears of death.
Irvin D. Yalom
#49. (P58) It is curious how, with his stark Darwinian outlook, his elevation of war to the central place in human history, and his racism, as well as his fixation on "great leaders," Churchill's worldview resembled that of his antagonist, Hitler.
Ralph Raico
#50. So often in TV, when you have an antagonist who's supposed to be the 'big baddie,' it's so easy for them to become cliched.
Michelle Forbes
#51. antagonist having one hand strapped behind his back and the other
Giles Milton
#52. Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion.
Thomas Paine
#53. It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.
Barbara Deming
#55. You could not fence with an antagonist who met rapier thrust with blow of battle axe.
L.M. Montgomery
#56. Testing the wrong person can prove a massive failure for the antagonist.
Carlos Wallace
#57. ...your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192
Jeff VanderMeer
#58. Ridicule has even been the most powerful enemy of enthusiasm, and properly the only antagonist that can be opposed to it with success.
Oliver Goldsmith
#59. The conventional Aristotelian plot proceeds by means of a protagonist, an antagonist, and a series of events comprising a rising action, climax and denouement.
John Kessel
#60. Your life, sir, is propelled
By a dream of the fear of having nightmares; your love
Is the fear of being alone; your world's history
The fear of a possible leap by a possible antagonist
Out of a possible shadow, or a not-improbable
Skeleton out of your dead-certain cupboard.
Christopher Fry
#61. I don't judge in my books. I don't have to have the antagonist get shot or the protagonist win. It's just how it comes out. I'm just telling a story.
Elmore Leonard
#62. I was tenaciously opposed by the governor and deputy-governor of the Bank, who had seats in parliament, and I had the City for an antagonist on almost every occasion.
William E. Gladstone
#63. From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.
Franz Kafka
#64. I've been keeping in stuff worse than that for more than twenty years."
- what the serial killer said to me. Based the antagonist in my novel on him. He's dead now.
Kristi Belcamino
#65. Evil is relative - and what I mean by that is that our villains are as complex, as deep and as compelling as any of our heroes. Every antagonist in the DC Universe has a unique darkness, desire and drive. And the reason for being of 'Forever Evil' is to explore that darkness.
Geoff Johns
#66. And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.
Virginia Woolf
#67. You can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a "demon," a "beast," or a "black dog," as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#68. I think in any movie really the two most interesting parts are the protagonist and the antagonist.
Cung Le
#69. There are few situations in life that cannot be resolved promptly, and to the satisfaction of all concerned, by either suicide, a bag of gold, or thrusting a despised antagonist over a precipice on a dark night
Ernest Bramah
#70. In all our pictures, we had an antagonist who becomes the good guy, and the underdog fulfills his quest.
Arthur Rankin Jr.
#71. I have been to hell and back. It's a place where all antagonist meet and most often hug and ask:
why didn't we love ourselves enough?
PK Gyewu Akrofi
#72. Subtlety will sometimes give safety, no less than strength; and minuteness has sometimes escaped, where magnitude would have been crushed. The little animal that kills the boa is formidable chiefly from its insignificance, which is incompressible by the folds of its antagonist.
Charles Caleb Colton
#73. For him, she was the evil one; the antagonist to his life story. The reason he was married at an early age.
And to her, he would always be her infatuation gone horribly wrong.
Alyssa Urbano
#74. Remember that when you meet your antagonist, to do everything in a mild agreeable manner. Let your courage be keen, but, at the same time, as polished as your sword.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
#75. You know my powers, my dear Watson, and yet at the end of three months I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#76. From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage.
Franz Kafka
#77. If you have to be the antagonist, you often have a lot more creative powers. You have a lot more color to you.
William Atherton
#78. I sense that you are nearby, son and daughter of the Almari bloodline. I will soon come for you both.
Eric Mrozek
#80. And thank you for not putting it in your book.
And fuck you for not putting it in your book.
Lynn Coady
#81. I'll allow you to live, if only for a little longer. -Lilith
C.D. Sutherland
#82. I'm often painted as the bad guy, and the artistic part of me wants to hand out the brush.
Criss Jami
#83. You're not so tough. No tougher than the man whose blood will spill from your veins.
Dawn M. Turner
#84. Behind every villain is a truth, whether it be perceived or actual.
Dalton Frey
#85. [H]is 'philosophy' seemed to consist of anything that would be particularly annoying to the powers that be without being so shocking that they would fire him. He got the reputation among the students as an original and a rebel without having to pay the penalty for actually being either.
Orson Scott Card
#86. We may think of ourselves as static anti-heroes, but in reality we're dynamic protagonists just waiting for our courage to kick in.
Justin Alcala
#87. Such is the great nature of man, it resides the true face beneath a glittering masquerade.
K. Hari Kumar
#88. I am bound to furnish my antagonists with arguments, but not with comprehension.
Benjamin Disraeli
#89. There's always enough retribution to be dealt.
Amber Silvia
