David Levithan Quotes

There is too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will. I must concede you the Devil. God doesn't really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We're so busy punishing ourselves.

I don't give the devil credit for creating nothing.

The devil made me do it.

There is also an age-old excuse: “The devil made me do it.” Not so! He can deceive you and mislead you, but he does not have the power to force you or anyone else to transgress or to keep you in transgression.

Evil into the mind of god or man may come and go, so unapproved, and leave no spot or blame behind.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

I think we are responsible for the universe, but that doesn't mean we decide anything.

Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

I think people have some control over what they want; there's a relationship - maybe not automatic - between what you want and get.

Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all.

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

If the devil doesn't exist... how do you explain that some people are a lot worse than they're smart enough to be?

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are determined.

You don’t knock on the devil’s door, boy, unless you want him to answer. (Ravyn)

The Rudderless World is not shaped by vague metaphysical Forces. It is not God who kills the Children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the Dogs. ... It´s us. Only us.

God's is the causality at the level of our being, and therefore the roots of our freedom. Ours in causality is determinative of what kind of being we're going to be through our free choices, what kind of action we are going to do through our decisions.

Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.

Calvin: Do you believe in the Devil? You know, a supreme evil being dedicated to the temptation, corruption, and destruction of man? Hobbes: I'm not sure man needs the help.

I know as well as any one, [the devil] is an adversary, whom if we resist, he will fly from us--but I seldom resist him at all; from a terror, that though I may conquer, I may still get a hurt in the combat--soinstead of thinking to make him fly, I generally fly myself.

The essence of God's action in wrath is to give people what they choose, in all its implications.

I believe we've been given free will, and we can take responsibility for our own lives and for creating our own environments - which I think at times can be a little much for people to deal with.

If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.

I'm not a proponent of people watching a movie, and then going out and doing something bad. People have been doing bad things, well before movies.

There's no free will," says the philosopher; "To hang is most unjust." "There is no free will," assents the officer; "We hang because we must.

Our virtues are voluntary (and in fact we are in a sense ourselves partly the cause of our moral dispositions, and it is our having a certain character that makes us set up an end of a certain kind), it follows that our vices are voluntary also; they are voluntary in the same manner as our virtues.