Time & Perspective Quote by Max von Sydow

Von Sydow is quietly stripping the horns off evil and leaving us with something more unsettling: the banality of damage. Coming from an actor whose face carried both medieval dread in The Seventh Seal and institutional menace in Minority Report, the line lands like a career-long rebuttal to the roles people project onto him. He’s not arguing that cruelty is imaginary; he’s arguing that “the devil” is a comforting screenplay device, a way to outsource responsibility to a supernatural villain and stop asking how ordinary systems, ordinary negligence, and ordinary misreadings turn lethal.

The phrasing does its work through demystification. “Indifference and misunderstandings” are almost comically small, the soft stuff of everyday life, not the operatic stuff of damnation. That’s the point. He’s relocating evil from grand intention to cumulative failure: the turned-away gaze, the unasked question, the assumption that calcifies into policy. The subtext is an actor’s skepticism about appearances. If you make a living inhabiting characters, you learn how easily “evil” gets cast from the outside - a look, a rumor, an accent, a record.

The second sentence is the moral pivot: people who “appear to be evil” are “victims of evil deeds.” Not always, but “most of the time” is a deliberate, human-scale wager. It’s an invitation to replace condemnation with investigation: who benefited, who was hurt first, what chain of harm is being mistaken for intrinsic villainy. In a culture addicted to monsters, von Sydow offers a harder plot: accountability without mythology, empathy without exoneration.