Angus B

“When it is stated in Genesis that God said to Adam, "Only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat," it follows as a matter of course that Adam really has not understood this word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit?

When it is assumed that the prohibition awakens the desire, one acquires knowledge instead of ignorance, and in that case Adam must have had a knowledge of freedom, because the desire was to use it. The explanation is therefore subsequent. The prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom's possibility. What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing -the anxious possibility of ”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

“Some even tried to use opium to commit suicide, swallowing large doses as poison. Others turned to crime to support their addiction, causing a wave of banditry to sweep through Nanking. After making conditions ripe for banditry in Nanking, the Japanese used the epidemic of crimes to justify their occupation, preaching the need for imperial law and order.”
― Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust Of World War II

“Humans diverged from apes about as long ago as African and Asian elephants did from each other, and they are genetically as close or distant. Yet we freely call both of those species “elephants” while obsessing over the specific point at which our own lineage moved from being an ape to being human. We even have special words for this process, such as humanization and anthropogenesis. That there was ever a point in time is a widespread illusion, like trying to find the precise wavelength in the light spectrum at which orange turns red. Our desire for sharp divisions is at odds with evolution’s habit of making extremely smooth transitions.”
― Frans de Waal, Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

“Perpetrators did not become fellow victims (as many of them later claimed to be) in the way some victims became accomplices of the perpetrators. The relationship between perpetrator and victim was not symmetrical. The range of choice each faced was totally different.”
― Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland