[People] would come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully-functioning human brain could conceive, then shout “The Devil Made Me Do It” and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was that the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn’t have to. That was what some humans found hard to understand. Hell wasn’t a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven…was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.
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From Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
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Almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible.
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From Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
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It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
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From Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
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[People ] were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.
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From Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
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God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, [ie., everybody.] to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time .
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From Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
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