Antagonist Quotes

Facing the sagging middle when writing a novel, while inevitable, may be
overcome by pre-planning. I divide my collection of proposed scenes into three acts, each scene inciting tension that builds toward the final crisis in Act Three. If by Act Two the emotional river isn't spilling over the banks, I reassess the plot so that once the writing is flowing I don't slide into a dry creek. The central character should be struggling to navigate life well into the end of Act One, even if her fiercest antagonist is only from within. ~ Patricia Hickman

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

(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

Yes, I am finally a match for Amy. The other morning I woke up next to her, and I studied the back of her skull. I tried to read her thoughts. For once I didn't feel like I was staring into the sun. I'm rising to my wife's level of madness. Because I can feel her changing me again: I was a callow boy, and then a man, good and bad. Now at last I'm the hero. I am the one to root for in the never-ending war story of our marriage. It's a story I can live with. Hell, at this point, I can't imagine my story without Amy. She is my forever antagonist.
We are one long frightening climax. ~ Gillian Flynn

The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot. ~ Mark Twain

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

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

Nobody is ever just a straight up protagonist or antagonist - everybody's morally ambiguous. ~ Cheyenne Jackson

It is the antagonist that we meet throughout life that aid us humans to our ultimate inner and outer goals by having us rip apart every fiber of our fucked up shady souls ~ D.C. Allen

Such is the great nature of man, it resides the true face beneath a glittering masquerade. ~ K. Hari Kumar

One thing becomes very clear; if the Empire declines and if it continues to exist only nominally, its antagonist, the Church, after enjoying untrammeled freedom from its ancient foe, did not know how to assume its legacy, and demonstrated its inability to organize the Western world according to the Guelph ideal. What replaced the Empire was not the Church at the head of a reinvigorated "Christendom," but the multiplicity of national states that were increasingly intolerant of any higher principle of authority. ~ Julius Evola

Yet as she tells the story, the change came about when that director stopped treating her like an antagonist and treated her like a person. He apologized for publicly calling her "baby-killer" and started spending time with her during her smoking breaks in the parking lot. Later, McCorvey accepted an invitation to church from a seven-year-old girl whose mother also worked at Operation Rescue. Pro-abortion forces had dismissed McCorvey - her dubious record of drug-dealing, alcohol, lesbianism, and rape made bad public relations - but Christian leaders took the time to counsel her in the faith, keeping her out of the public spotlight for half a year. "Ultimately, God is the one who changes hearts," says McCorvey now. "A Christian witness is the biggest tool in effecting change. ~ Philip Yancey

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

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

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

Because the character is a fiction, he's a composite of other contributors to the science that brought this enzyme therapy through the process. We had the opportunity to make him up out of those things that helped tell the story. We wanted to create both ally and antagonist for John [in the Extraordinary measures]. ~ Harrison Ford

You're not so tough. No tougher than the man whose blood will spill from your veins. ~ Dawn M. Turner

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

In holding your antagonist, therefore, you should hold him lightly as if your arms were nothing but chains which connect you with him, so that you may stretch or contract them at will when necessary, and pull or push him in any direction you choose. If you pull your opponent or apply your tricks on him by putting from the beginning too much strength in your arms, then you are going to contest with him by means of your power and against the principles of Judo. In doing so, you can never expect to succeed in your contest. ~ Yokoyama Sakujiro

Angel of the Forsaken Hope
Wielder of the Sword of Wind and Obsidian
Slice the Algorithms from our Foe.

Mermaid Beneath the Seven Dancing Moons,
Cantress of the Siren Song,
Drown our Enemies in the Data-stream.

Nymph of the Logic Tree,
Child of the First Word,
Give our Antagonist to Grief. ~ Roger Zelazny

This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern. ~ Barbara Deming

ANTAGONIST, n. The miserable scoundrel who won't let us. ~ Ambrose Bierce

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

From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you. ~ Franz Kafka

Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world. ~ Doris Lessing

Today, women have as much of a place as protagonists and antagonist as men. ~ JP Wolfe

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

Born enemies don't fight. Nations you would say were designed to go to war against each other by their skins, their language, their smell; always jealous of each other, always hating each other; they're not the ones who fight. You will find the real antagonists in nations fate has groomed and made ready for the same war. ~ Jean Giraudoux

One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims, men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque cone of smoke. And then night and extinction – nothing but a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead. ~ H.G. Wells

Three features mark the Anglo-American system as different from all others. One is the extent to which our law is formed in litigation. Another feature is the way we conduct these cases: we pit antagonists against each other, to cast up from their struggles the material of decisions. A third- and largest in the public consciousness- is the trial by jury. ~ Charles Rembar

The zeal and virtue of Ali were never outstripped by any recent proselyte. He united the qualifications of a poet, a soldier, and a saint; his wisdom still breathes in a collection of moral and religious sayings; and every antagonist, in the combats of the tongue or of the sword, was subdued by his eloquence and valour. From the first hour of his mission to the last rites of his funeral, the apostle was never forsaken by a generous friend, whom he delighted to name his brother, his vicegerent, and the faithful Aaron of a second Moses. ~ Edward Gibbon

When I was in college, the board game RISK was popular for a while. We'd get stoned and I'd stare at the little plastic pieces moving across the territories and get utterly confused about allies and enemies, arguing that nothing could be that black and white, complicating the whole notion of the game. But I understand that estrogen is my enemy now, the very thing that made me big-busted and fertile and a terrific nurser, has turned on me, inside my milk ducts where my body incubated nourishment that made my babies pink cheeked and roly-poly thighed. It's all so twisted and ironic and confusing. Tamoxifen, a hero and a hazard, my breasts, a giver and taker of life, and I, the protagonist and the antagonist in this story ~ Gail Konop Baker

Pentecostals also used sarcasm to gouge their enemies. [Charles] Parham led the way, challenging a local Baptist antagonist who routinely tagged his name with Ph.D., D.D., and LL.D. to come by and spend a week at Parham's school. When God was finished with him, Parham promised, he would want to add 'A.S.S.' to the list. ~ Grant Wacker

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

Fear plays the role of antagonist in the story of your life ~ Anne Marie Miller

Talking frankly about race may make white people uncomfortable. Taking a stand to demonstrate the impact of race on law enforcement is difficult. Look what happened when a National Football League star, protesting discrimination, decided to kneel during the national anthem. Some understood the protest and the right to peacefully demonstrate pursuant to the First Amendment to our Constitution. Others have used the protest to divide us further and rally the white supremacist elements of their constituency. Yes, I am speaking to you, Mr. President, the principal antagonist of racial harmony. ~ Mark M. Bello

And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life. ~ Virginia Woolf

I'm often painted as the bad guy, and the artistic part of me wants to hand out the brush. ~ Criss Jami

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

Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error. ~ Thomas Jefferson

No man is an island- he is a holon. A Janus-faced entity who, looking inward, sees himself as a self-contained unique whole, looking outward as a dependent part. His self-assertive tendency is the dynamic manifestation of his unique wholeness, his autonomy and independence as a holon. Its equally universal antagonist, the integrative tendency, expresses his dependence on the larger whole to which he belongs: his 'part-ness.'. ~ Arthur Koestler

..I began speaking.. First, I took issue with the media's characterization of the post-Katrina New Orleans as resembling the third world as its poor citizens clamored for a way out. I suggested that my experience in New Orleans working with the city's poorest people in the years before the storm had reflected the reality of third-world conditions in New Orleans, and that Katrina had not turned New Orleans into a third-world city but had only revealed it to the world as such. I explained that my work, running Reprieve, a charity that brought lawyers and volunteers to the Deep South from abroad to work on death penalty issues, had made it clear to me that much of the world had perceived this third-world reality, even if it was unnoticed by our own citizens.

To try answer Ryan's question, I attempted to use my own experience to explain that for many people in New Orleans, and in poor communities across the country, the government was merely an antagonist, a terrible landlord, a jailer, and a prosecutor. As a lawyer assigned to indigent people under sentence of death and paid with tax dollars, I explained the difficulty of working with clients who stand to be executed and who are provided my services by the state, not because they deserve them, but because the Constitution requires that certain appeals to be filed before these people can be killed. The state is providing my clients with my assistance, maybe the first real assistance they have ever received from the s ~ Billy Sothern

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

Those who do not understand war believe it contention between armies, friend against foe. No. Rather friend and foe duel as one against an unseen antagonist, whose name is Fear, and seek, even entwined in death, to mount to that promontory whose ensign is honor. ~ Steven Pressfield

I believed suddenly not merely in evil as a necessary antagonist in movies and books - bad guys and boogeymen - not merely in evil as the consequence of parental rejection or parental indulgence or social injustice, but in Evil as a presence alive in the world. ~ Dean Koontz

All wicked are antagonist but all antagonist are not all wicked. ~ Ikechukwu Joseph

You don't really understand an antagonist until you understand why he's a protagonist in his own version of the world. ~ John Rogers

As a screenwriter - if you are completely honest with yourself - you can't help but admit that your greatest threat is the audience, where audience is not understood as a demographic category but as a character outside the script to whom the story is addressed. A good part of the drama necessary for uncovering the story resides in the conflict between the storyteller and his/her audience. Audience plays the part of antagonist to the writer's role as protagonist. The writer drives the action, which is forever complicated, frustrated and undermined by the audience's needs and sensibilities. Audience wants you to prove it. Audience has a chip on its shoulder, and doesn't give a damn. Audience has been there and done that in the guise of your mother, your father, your ex-, your worst enemy. Audience laughs at your stupidity and dares you to change its view of you and the story world that you would have it care about. Audience is defiant. It has your number. The only way you can defeat it is by carrying a bigger stick - your only defence is an inspired offence, namely the story. ~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

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

The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It's part of the human condition to be deeply unfaithful to constancy. I do believe that. ~ Vivian Gornick

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

I am bound to furnish my antagonists with arguments, but not with comprehension. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

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

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

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

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

How do you get the protagonists and antagonists together, in the same space, without somebody having to die? So, we ended up having to tell two distinct stories, which is never the ultimate way to create a great serialized drama. So then, of course, we had the tragedy with Andy [Whitfield], which made everything very difficult and pushed back. ~ Chris Albrecht

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

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

There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of danger-ous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the person
of an antagonist odious. ~ David Hume

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

Testing the wrong person can prove a massive failure for the antagonist. ~ Carlos Wallace

There is an uncomfortable willingness among privacy campaigners to discriminate against mass surveillance conducted by the state to the exclusion of similar surveillance conducted for profit by large corporations. Partially, this is a vestigial ethic from the Californian libertarian origins of online pro-privacy campaigning. Partially, it is a symptom of the superior public relations enjoyed by Silicon Valley technology corporations, and the fact that those corporations also provide the bulk of private funding for the flagship digital privacy advocacy groups, leading to a conflict of interest.


At the individual level, many of even the most committed privacy campaigners have an unacknowledged addiction to easy-to-use, privacy-destroying amenities like Gmail, Facebook, and Apple products. As a result, privacy campaigners frequently overlook corporate surveillance abuses. When they do address the abuses of companies like Google, campaigners tend to appeal to the logic of the market, urging companies to make small concessions to user privacy in order to repair their approval ratings. There is the false assumption that market forces ensure that Silicon Valley is a natural government antagonist, and that it wants to be on the public's side - that profit-driven multinational corporations partake more of the spirit of democracy than government agencies.


Many privacy advocates justify a predominant focus on abuses by the state on the basis that th ~ Julian Assange

It is impossible to behold these waves without feeling a conviction that an island, though built of the hardest rock, let it be porphyry, granite, or quartz, would ultimately yield and be demolished by such an irresistible power. Yet these low, insignificant coral-islets stand and are victorious: for here another power, as an antagonist, takes part in the contest. The organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime, one by one, from the foaming breakers, and unite them into a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments; yet what will that tell against the accumulated labour of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month? […] We feel surprise when travellers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals! This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason. ~ Charles Darwin

But, don't you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardness and stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him. ~ Mark Twain

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

Distinctively gentle he was, and trustworthy, and of special courtesy. His great physical strength was never used in combat, men remembered, except when needed for the defence of the weak. In the last hours, when his mind went roving over the past, he said to someone who stoody by: 'I thank god that in all my life I never struck a man in anger...Ishould have killed my antagonist and then his blood, at this awful moment, would have lain heavily on my soul....Idie at peace with all mankind.' (Referring to Augustine Washington, husband of Mary Ball and father of George Washington.) ~ Nancy Byrd Turner

They also observed that the amygdala in the vaccinated monkeys didn't mature with time as it was supposed to. The amygdala, incidentally, plays an important role in social interactions. Maybe it's not so surprising they also observed that in the vaccinated monkeys the opioid antagonist diprenorphine (DPN) levels never lowered throughout the study. In the placebo group, the DPN levels decreased noticeably. One function of DPN is to block social interaction. What this means is the research showed that the social behavior of those monkeys that received the actual vaccines, where the DPN levels did not decrease, turned anti-social. We found there was at least one more study undertaken to verify the association between DPN and social behavior. Performed in 1981[141]. The authors of that study believe the release of opioids in the brain encourages social interactions. So, when the body fails to decrease the amount of the antagonist DPN, it not only blocks the opioids that encourage social interactions, but it blocks the desire to socially interact. ~ James Morcan

Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. ~ Thomas Paine

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

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.

Envy is the antagonist of the fortunate. ~ Epictetus

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

If your antagonist can upset you, he owns you at some level. ~ George J. Thompson

Behind every villain is a truth, whether it be perceived or actual. ~ Dalton Frey

What then is death? If it be a stopping of life, then that is which cannot be. But it may be only a change in the form of life that looks like a stopping, and is not! If Death be stronger than Life, so that he stops life, how then was Life able so to flout him, that he, the thing that was not, arose from the antenatal sepulchre on which Death sat throned in impotent negation of entity, unable to preclude existence, and yet able to annihilate it? Life alone is: nothingness is not; Death cannot destroy; he is not the antagonist, not the opposite of life. ~ George MacDonald

And thank you for not putting it in your book.
And fuck you for not putting it in your book. ~ Lynn Coady

I've always been the protagonist of my own story, but it's interesting to think I could be a villain in somebody else's. Somebody out there has tried to attain or achieve something, and I have stood in their way. To an extent, we're each an encapsulation of both protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain. ~ Sophia Lee

It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting results of the October revolution, whose object was the global overthrow of capitalism, was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace - that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War, and, by establishing the popularity of economic planning, furnishing it with some of the procedures for its reform ~ Eric Hobsbawm

An Act for establishing religious Freedom.

Section 1

Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free;

That all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and therefore are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as was in his Almighty power to do,

That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time;

That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical;

That even the forcing him to support this or that teacher of his own religious persuasion is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor, whose morals he would make his pattern, and whose powers he feels most persuasive to righteousness, and is withdrawing from the Ministry those temporary rewards, which, proceeding from an approbation of their person ~ Thomas Jefferson

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

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

As Deborah sits below a tree to give advice to her people, the cat could envision itself above Deborah. In the cats mind, the visual allusion would first point to the prophetess as being a predator. This consideration would not be hard to reach for the lucid intelligent cat as she is giving advice to her people here as how to engage in war. Envisioning this text, the cats would find it hard not to recognize the predatory nature of the human beneath it. This fact means that Deborah becomes, in feline hermeneutics, the antagonist. The prophetess would be seen as a danger to the cat. This could lead the cat to deduce that the enemy of the prophetess was a fellow protagonist. Then the advice that Deborah gave to Barak would seem as a malicious attack on a ally or worse an innocent. ~ Leviak B. Kelly

Reason and emotion are not antagonists. What seems like a struggle between two opposing ideas or values, one of which, automatic and unconscious, manifests itself in the form of a feeling. ~ Nathaniel Branden

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

But though every created thing is, in this sense, a mystery, the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light ... Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself. ~ Thomas Paine

When we embark on the writing journey, it is an inevitable truth that we draw upon personal experiences in creating our characters. Our experiences shape us and shape how we see the world around us. From a creative perspective, personal experiences are a gold mine. How deep we are willing to go into our personal experience can mean the difference between a bland, cookie cutter archetype and a compelling character – either protagonist or antagonist. ~ Dean Mayes

In all our pictures, we had an antagonist who becomes the good guy, and the underdog fulfills his quest. ~ Arthur Rankin, Jr.

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

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

I'll allow you to live, if only for a little longer. -Lilith ~ C.D. Sutherland

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

...your antagonist is a hero in their own mind... p.192 ~ Jeff VanderMeer

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

From a real antagonist one gains boundless courage. ~ Franz Kafka

You can't compare any book on earth to that which God has created. It has visionless humans as flat characters and those with vision as round characters. It has lucifer as the antagonist and himself as the protagonist. The setting is designed with living creatures and plants to give verisimilitude. It is the only book on earth that has no extremity ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

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.

In a debate, rather pull to pieces the argument of thy antagonists than offer him any of thy own; for thus thou wilt fight him in his own country. ~ Henry Fielding

It's bizarre, but as disgusting and evil and terrible as the Wolfman is, I can't help but feel he's unable to control himself. It seems to me he makes up bizarre excuses to make it okay for him to kill and rape, because he can't stop himself from killing and raping. Whether born or made, the Wolfman is more creature than human. He's a monster. ~ Carolyn Lee Adams

The basic script of an agonist tending, an antagonist reacting, played out in different combinations and outcomes, underlies the meaning of the causal constructions in most, perhaps all, of the world's languages. And in language after language, the prototypical force-dynamic scenario-an antagonist directly and intentionally causing a passive agonist to change from its intrinsic state-gets pride of place in the language's most concise causative construction. ~ Steven Pinker