I went looking for embodiments of pure evil, but found ordinary people.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the manifestation of evil is often found in ordinary individuals rather than in extraordinary monsters.
Joshua Oppenheimer's quote reflects on the often unsettling reality that acts of evil do not always come from malevolent beings or monsters; instead, they can stem from regular people who make cruel choices. This challenges our understanding of morality and complicates the narrative of good versus evil, implying that we must confront the uncomfortable truth of our shared humanity, even when it leads to horrific actions.
In practice
Discussing the nature of evil in a philosophy class.
If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.
In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.
We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths.
People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is.
I think 'The Act of Killing' forced people to look at the problem, but the problem is actually a state run by thugs, or a shadow state, a part of the state that's run by thugs, and a military that enjoys complete legal - not just impunity, but immunity.
Hands make the world each day.
You find in the Koran hundreds of verses to support women's rights, and perhaps four or five that do not.
It is an undoubted truth that every doctrine that comes from God, leads to God; and that which doth not tend to promote holiness is not of God.
To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.
I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.
Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
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