Daily Inspiration Quote by Ralph Steadman

Evil here isn’t pitched as a horned outsider stalking humanity; it’s a process we participate in, almost bureaucratically, through the tidy logic of payback. Steadman frames “evil” as something with initiative - “always devising” - but the engine is plainly human: “man’s restless need” to turn hate into action. The phrasing does a lot of work. “Restless” makes revenge sound less like justice and more like an itch you keep scratching until it bleeds. “Exact” carries the coldness of accounting: you don’t just retaliate, you collect. That’s the corrosive part - not a single dramatic sin, but the way repeated, rationalized retaliation eats away at whatever bonds keep a society from dissolving into score-settling.

As a cartoonist, Steadman’s worldview is steeped in caricature and abrasion. His lines on the page famously look like they were dragged through anxiety, and this sentence has the same feel: moral rot rendered as chemistry. “Corrosive misery” implies slow damage, the kind that spreads quietly while everyone insists they’re merely responding. The subtext is a critique of self-exoneration: revenge is sold as closure, but it breeds a misery that feels impersonal (“evil”) even though it’s handmade.

Contextually, Steadman’s generation lived through the long aftershocks of world war and the televised normalization of conflict. The quote reads like a warning against the cultural glamour of vengeance - personal, political, national - and how easily “hate” dresses itself up as righteous necessity.