Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Anthony Horowitz

Quote by Anthony Horowitz

Work

Nightshade

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Anthony Horowitz
Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz is a British novelist renowned for his suspense and crime novels. Born on April 5, 1955, he began his writing career in 1981. Horowitz's works span various styles, including historical novels, children's literature, and adult fiction. He has received numerous literary awards, including the Silver Dagger Award and the Edgar Award. more

You May Also Like

“Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about them. And indeed that popular phase exactly expresses the point. The gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective; that it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an assignation. But the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that he had broken them.”

EvilMagicDevilGoodNonsenseWitchPracticalityNymph
Book:The Everlasting Man
Create image

“The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviors are among our worst and most damaging, words like 'evil' and 'soul' will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes, that they will be as rarely spoken in a courtroom as in an auto repair shop. And crucially, the analogy holds in a key way, extending to instances of dangerous people without anything obviously wrong with their frontal cortex, genes, and so on. When a car is being dysfunctional and dangerous and we take it to a mechanic, this is not a dualistic situation where (a) if the mechanic discovers some broken widget causing the problem, we have a mechanistic explanation, but (b) if the mechanic can’t find anything wrong, we’re dealing with an evil car; sure, the mechanic can speculate on the source of the problem—maybe it’s the blueprint from which the car was built, maybe it was the building process, maybe the environment contains some unknown pollutant that somehow impairs function, maybe someday we’ll have sufficiently powerful techniques in the auto shop to spot some key molecule in the engine that is out of whack—but in the meantime we’ll consider this car to be evil. Car free will also equals 'internal forces we do not understand yet.”

EvilCriminal JusticeCriminality
Author:Robert Sapolsky
Create image

“Evil has an ordinary face. It laughs, it cries, it deflects, it rationalizes, it makes great pasta. These [Mafia] killers were people who had crossed an indelible line in human experience by intentionally taking another life. They all constructed their own narrative to explain and justify their own killing. None of them saw themselves as bad people. To a person, they all said the same thing: The first time was really, really hard. After that, not so much.”

EvilMoralityMoral Relativism
Book:A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership
Create image

“Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren’t under control, they can’t drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasurable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistant seizures 'deserves' to be banned from driving... it is important to remember that some, many, maybe even most of the people who were prosecuting epileptics in the fifteenth century were no different from us—sincere, cautious, and ethical, concerned about the serious problems threatening their society, hoping to bequeath their children a safer world. Just operating with an unrecognizably different mind-set.”

EvilCriminal JusticeCriminalityMoral Cognition
Book:Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Create image