Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I taught you to use the darkness in people's hearts to manipulate them, didn't I Obito? If there's no darkness, you create it.”
Madara Uchiha Quotes
2 quotes from Naruto, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Less a philosopher than a technician of despair, and the series lets him say so. Madara's plan requires people to be broken enough to prefer an illusion, and his instruction to his own recruit is that where the darkness is missing, you manufacture it. He is also, finally, wrong about who was using whom.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Inside a dream? What are you talking about, Black Zetsu? I was the one that created you in the first place. You are nothing more than my will made incarnate!”
Read as a villain's last tantrum, and it is a great deal funnier and colder than that. Every sentence in it is false, and Madara is the last person in the story to find out. Black Zetsu is not his will made incarnate; it belongs to Kaguya, it predates him by centuries, and it wrote the stone tablet he built his entire plan on. So the man who spent a lifetime insisting that everyone else was living in an illusion learns he was the illusion's longest-running participant, and his objection is to the paperwork rather than to the premise. Note which part offends him. Not being used, which he has done to everyone he ever met, but the suggestion that he did not originate the idea. The most powerful figure in the series turns out to have been a tool that thought it was a hand, and the show delivers the reveal as a correction to a clerical error.
Lines credited to Madara Uchiha that we have checked
Not everything circulating under this name was said by them, and some of the least likely ones were. Each verdict links to the evidence.
Read Madara Uchiha's story from the start
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This is the clearest description of what Madara actually does, and it is a method rather than a philosophy. The distinction matters because his plan is usually discussed as if it were an argument about human nature, and it is not. Rin's death is the case in point: Obito arrives too late by a margin that was arranged, and the despair that follows is a manufactured input rather than a discovery about the world. The second sentence is the part with teeth. It concedes that the raw material may not be there, which means the diagnosis he sells his recruits, that people are irredeemably bent and only an illusion can save them, is one he does not believe. He is a man who requires the world to be a certain way and is willing to make it that way to be right about it. Very few villains in this genre are permitted to say so.