The Nature of Evil

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men.  Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”  ~Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials