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Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

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Lailah Gifty Akita

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“Was he evil? I've spent a lot of time wrestling with that question. In the end, I don't think he was. Most people believe suicide is a choice, and violence is a choice; those things are under a person's control. Yet we know from talking to survivors of suicide attempts that their decision-making ability shifts in some way we don't well understand. In our conversation, psychologist and suicide researcher Dr. Matthew Nock at Harvard used a phrase I like very much: dysfunction in decision making. If suicide seems like the only way out of an existence so painful it has become intolerable, is that really an exercise of free will? Of course, Dylan did not simply die by suicide. He committed murder; he killed people. We've all felt angry enough to fantasize about killing someone else. What allows the vast majority of us to feel appalled and frightened by the mere impulse, and another person to go through with it? If someone chooses to hurt others, what governs the ability to make that choice? If what we think of as evil is really the absence of conscience, then we have to ask, how is it a person ceases to connect with their conscience?”

EvilMental HealthColumbineSchool ShootingsBrain HealthDylan Klebold
Book:A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy
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“This dogmatic and insistent moralism clearly ends by seriously impairing Toynbee's judgment. He refuses to concede what common experience teaches, namely that the wicked do quite often flourish like the green bay tree, that in human affairs force and violence are occasionally decisive, or that love and gentleness are sometimes productive of evil.”

EvilGoodNaive
Book:The Chatham House Version: And Other Middle Eastern Studies
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