Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

you can apologize for something you have done, but only a fool apologizes for things that other people have done, for he has no authority to do that.

It’s by our choices and actions that we succeed or fail. Without the freedom of choices, we would have no dignity.”

“Free will and freedom itself require the problem of evil. People who are truly grown up, not just in years but also in their minds and hearts, understand that freedom can’t exist without the choice between right and wrong. To be free, we accept the problem of evil—and then resist it.”

“We are what we are, and we need to have faith in that.” As a call to war, it was not as bold as the taunt Frederick the Great used with his soldiers at Kolín—“Come on, you rascals, do you want to live forever?”—but

I despaired that so many people, born with the knowledge of intuition and with the ability to reason, shaped their lives instead by sheer emotion. So many were swept away by boldfaced lies and swayed into currents of vicious fantasies, until they were so far from the shore of truth that they couldn’t even see it. They were everywhere in our time, controlled by those who taught them to fear what didn’t threaten them and receive with gladness those ideas and forces that would rob them of purpose, of meaning, of security—and sooner than later would take away their lives as well.