“The real evil is the power to kill people.”
Soichiro Yagami Quotes
2 quotes from Death Note, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
The one moral position in the story that never moves, stated early so that every argument about ideal worlds afterwards is measured against it. Wikiquote's manga section lists him as Chief Yagami.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Light, my son, from one murderer to another, I'll see you in Hell!”
The line is a lie, delivered inside a staged execution built to make a suspect drop his guard, and the machinery only works because the audience believes the father might mean it. The task force needed someone Light could not read, so they used the one person whose morality he had already catalogued as inflexible. The performance costs the father nothing except every assumption his son had about him.
Read Soichiro Yagami's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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Concede the easy criticism: a police chief saying that killing is wrong is not an insight. What gives it weight is the placement: it is said early, by the one character whose moral position never moves, in a story that spends its remaining length making the opposite case with tremendous style. Every later argument about ideal worlds is measured against this sentence, and the series is careful that it was said first.