Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.
“Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They’d been brought up to it and weren’t, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren’t. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.”
Humans try their best to make their world worse.
“he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. 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. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course.”
Free will allows the most horrible monsters to be an angel the very next second
“And just when you’d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course.”
The ducks have Pavlovian reactions to secret agents
“The ducks in St James’s Park are so used to being fed bread by secret agents meeting clandestinely that they have developed their own Pavlovian reaction. Put a St James’s Park duck in a laboratory cage and show it a picture of two men – one usually wearing a coat with a fur collar, the other something sombre with a scarf – and it’ll look up expectantly. The Russian cultural attaché’s black bread is particularly sought after by the more discerning duck, while the head of MI9’s soggy Hovis with Marmite is relished by the connoisseurs. Aziraphale tossed a crust to a scruffy-looking drake, which caught it and sank immediately.”
Dogs and wolves
“There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf.”
Worse to die obscure than to live on in everyone's minds forever
“Notoriety wasn’t as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.”
Pulsifer's Alien Encounter
‘Morning, sir or madam or neuter,’ the thing said. ‘This your planet, is it?’ The other alien, which was stubby and green, had wandered off into the woods by the side of the road. Out of the corner of his eye Newt saw it kick a tree, and then run a leaf through some complicated gadget on its belt. It didn’t look very pleased. ‘Well, yes. I suppose so,’ he said. The toad stared thoughtfully at the skyline. ‘Had it long, have we, sir?’ it said. ‘Er. Not personally. I mean, as a species, about half a million years. I think.’ The alien exchanged glances with its colleague. ‘Been letting the old acid rain build up, haven’t we, sir?’ it said. ‘Been letting ourselves go a bit with the old hydrocarbons, perhaps?’ ‘I’m sorry?’ ‘Could you tell me your planet’s albedo, sir?’ said the toad, still staring levelly at the horizon as though it was doing something interesting. ‘Er. No.’ ‘Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you, sir, that your polar icecaps are below regulation size for a planet of this category, sir.’ ‘Oh, dear,’ said Newt. He was wondering who he could tell about this, and realizing that there was absolutely no one who would believe him. The toad bent closer. It seemed to be worried about something, insofar as Newt was any judge of the expressions of an alien race he’d never encountered before. ‘We’ll overlook it on this occasion, sir.’ Newt gabbled. ‘Oh. Er. I’ll see to it – well, when I say I, I mean, I think Antarctica or something belongs to every country, or something, and—’ ‘The fact is, sir, that we have been asked to give you a message.’ ‘Oh?’ ‘Message runs “We give you a message of universal peace and cosmic harmony an’ suchlike”. Message ends,’ said the toad. ‘Oh.’ Newt turned this over in his mind. ‘Oh. That’s very kind.’ ‘Have you got any idea why we have been asked to bring you this message, sir?’ said the toad. Newt brightened. ‘Well, er, I suppose,’ he flailed, ‘what with Mankind’s, er, harnessing of the atom and—’ ‘Neither have we, sir.’ The toad stood up. ‘One of them phenomena, I expect. Well, we’d better be going.’ It shook its head vaguely, turned around and waddled back to the saucer without another word. Newt stuck his head out of the window. ‘Thank you!’ The small alien walked past the car. ‘CO2 level up point five per cent,’ it rasped, giving him a meaningful look. ‘You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don’t you?’ The two of them righted the third alien, dragged it back up the ramp, and shut the door. Newt waited for a while, in case there were any spectacular light displays, but it just stood there. Eventually he drove up on the verge and around it. When he looked in his rear-view mirror it had gone.
The History Of Gadgets and Gizmos and Doodads
Anathema owned very little in the way of furniture. The only thing she’d bothered to bring with her had been her clock, one of the family heirlooms. It wasn’t a full-cased grandfather clock, but a wall clock with a free-swinging pendulum that E. A. Poe would cheerfully have strapped someone under. Newt kept finding his eye drawn to it. ‘It was built by an ancestor of mine,’ said Anathema, putting the coffee cups down on the table. ‘Sir Joshua Device. You may have heard of him? He invented the little rocking thing that made it possible to build accurate clocks cheaply? They named it after him.’ ‘The Joshua?’ said Newt guardedly. ‘The device.’ In the last half hour Newt had heard some pretty unbelievable stuff and was close to believing it, but you have to draw the line somewhere. ‘The device is named after a real person?’ he said. ‘Oh, yes. Fine old Lancashire name. From the French, I believe. You’ll be telling me next you’ve never heard of Sir Humphrey Gadget—’ ‘Oh, now come on—’ ‘—who devised a gadget that made it possible to pump out flooded mineshafts. Or Pietr Gizmo? Or Cyrus T. Doodad, America’s foremost black inventor? Thomas Edison said that the only other contemporary practical scientists he admired were Cyrus T. Doodad and Ella Reader Widget. And—’ She looked at Newt’s blank expression. ‘I did my Ph.D. on them,’ she said. ‘The people who invented things so simple and universally useful that everyone forgot that they’d ever actually needed to be invented. Sugar?’
Agnes Nutter was too accurate for her own good
Most psychic abilities are caused by a simple lack of temporal focus, and the mind of Agnes Nutter was so far adrift in Time that she was considered pretty mad even by the standards of seventeenth-century Lancashire, where mad prophetesses were a growth industry. But she was a treat to listen to, everyone agreed. She used to go on about curing illnesses by using a sort of mould, and the importance of washing your hands so that the tiny little animals who caused diseases would be washed away, when every sensible person knew that a good stink was the only defence against the demons of ill health. She advocated running at a sort of gentle bouncing trot as an aid to living longer, which was extremely suspicious and first put the Witchfinders on to her, and stressed the importance of fibre in diet, although here she was clearly ahead of her time since most people were less bothered about the fibre in their diet than the gravel. And she wouldn’t cure warts.
Pepper's big brain move(Adam earlier said that one hamburger costs millions of acres of rainforest)
‘We could go into Tadfield this afternoon and not have a hamburger,’ said Pepper. ‘If all four of us don’t have one, that’s millions of acres of rainforest they won’t have to cut down.’
The point of fiction is that it's fictional
‘You jus’ think of all the amazin’ stuff afterwards,’ said Adam enthusiastically. ‘You can fill up America with all new cowboys an’ Indians an’ policemen an’ gangsters an’ cartoons an’ spacemen and stuff. Won’t that be fantastic?’ Wensleydale looked miserably at the other two. They were sharing a thought that none of them would be able to articulate very satisfactorily even in normal times. Broadly, it was that there had once been real cowboys and gangsters, and that was great. And there would always be pretend cowboys and gangsters, and that was also great. But real pretend cowboys and gangsters, that were alive and not alive and could be put back in their box when you were tired of them – this did not seem great at all. The whole point about gangsters and cowboys and aliens and pirates was that you could stop being them and go home.
A Good Threat
‘Your fate will be whispered by mothers in dark places to frighten their young,’
He had only ever planned as far as B.
Do you feel lucky?’ Hastur gestured, and the plastic bulb dissolved like rice paper, spilling water all over Crowley’s desk, and all over Crowley’s suit. ‘Yes,’ said Hastur. And then he smiled. His teeth were too sharp, and his tongue flickered between them. ‘Do you?’ Crowley said nothing. Plan A had worked. Plan B had failed. Everything depended on Plan C, and there was one drawback to this: he had only ever planned as far as B.
People believe in things to comfort themselves and ward off uncertainty
Although Madame Tracy was by many yardsticks quite stupid, she had an instinct in certain matters, and when it came to dabbling in the occult her reasoning was faultless. Dabbling, she’d realized, was exactly what her customers wanted. They didn’t want to be shoved in it up to their necks. They didn’t want the multi-planular mysteries of Time and Space, they just wanted to be reassured that Mother was getting along fine now she was dead
She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person
In order to enhance the occult aspects of herself, Julia had begun to wear far too much handbeaten silver jewellery and green eyeshadow. She felt she looked haunted and gaunt and romantic, and she would have, if she had lost another thirty pounds. She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person.
All it takes to blend in is to get in
Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you’re in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.
The world is an organism, and we are building a monstrous beast.
you took the world away and just left the electricity, it would look like the most exquisite filigree ever made – a ball of twinkling silver lines with the occasional coruscating spike of a satellite beam. Even the dark areas would glow with radar and commercial radio waves. It could be the nervous system of a great beast. Here and there cities make knots in the web but most of the electricity is, as it were, mere musculature, concerned only with crude work. But for fifty years or so people had been giving electricity brains. And now it was alive, in the same way that fire is alive. Switches were welding shut. Relays fused. In the heart of silicon chips whose microscopic architecture looked like a street plan of Los Angeles fresh pathways opened up, and hundreds of miles away bells rang in underground rooms and men stared in horror at what certain screens were telling them. Heavy steel doors shut firmly in secret hollow mountains, leaving people on the other side to pound on them and wrestle with fuse boxes which had melted. Bits of desert and tundra slid aside, letting fresh air into air-conditioned tombs, and blunt shapes ground ponderously into position.
What really causes wars...
‘You see,’ said Crowley, his voice leaden with fatalistic gloom, ‘it doesn’t really work that simply. You think wars get started because some old duke gets shot, or someone cuts off someone’s ear, or someone’s sited their missiles in the wrong place. It’s not like that. That’s just, well, just reasons, which haven’t got anything to do with it. What really causes wars is two sides that can’t stand the sight of one another and the pressure builds up and up and then anything will cause it. Anything at all.
If you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.
‘I don’t see what’s so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset ’cos they act like people,’ said Adam severely. ‘Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive. If I was in charge, I’d try makin’ people live a lot longer, like ole Methuselah. It’d be a lot more interestin’ and they might start thinkin’ about the sort of things they’re doing to all the environment and ecology, because they’ll still be around in a hundred years’ time.’
“You’re not going to heaven… but maybe life on earth could be heaven” - Bo Burnham, From God’s Perspective
Crowley and Aziraphale's sweet farewell to each other
He smiled at Crowley. ‘I’d just like to say,’ he said, ‘if we don’t get out of this, that … I’ll have known, deep down inside, that there was a spark of goodness in you.’ ‘That’s right,’ said Crowley bitterly. ‘Make my day.’ Aziraphale held out his hand. ‘Nice knowing you,’ he said. Crowley took it. ‘Here’s to the next time,’ he said. ‘And … Aziraphale?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Just remember I’ll have known that, deep down inside, you were just enough of a bastard to be worth liking.’