Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

She read about New Women. She hadn’t ever realized that she’d been an Old Woman, but after some thought she decided that titles like that were all one with the romance and the knitting and the orgasms, and the really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.

Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.

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, in Crowley’s opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real gr

“Yeah. But my people are only in favor of disobedience in general terms. It’s specific disobedience they come down on heavily.” “Such as disobedience to themselves?”

Of course, he was all in favor of Armageddon in general terms. If anyone had asked him why he’d been spending centuries tinkering in the affairs of mankind he’d have said, “Oh, in order to bring about Armageddon and the triumph of Hell.” But it was one thing to work to bring it about, and quite another for it to actually happen.

when a human was good or bad it was because they wanted to be. Whereas people like Crowley and, of course, himself, were set in their ways right from the start. People couldn’t become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.

was the sort of sensible arrangement that many isolated agents, working in awkward conditions a long way from their superiors, reach with their opposite number when they realize that they have more in common with their immediate opponents than their remote allies.

They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They 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.

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.