Author: Edmund Crispin

Mistrust of experts, in spite of all that the apologists for technocracy can advance against it, is deeply rooted in the English character, and Fen, whose habit of mind was not cosmopolitan, shared in it abundantly.

From the book Sudden Vengeance

Superstition is not mere intellectual error; it is a part of the emotional life, and the worldly-wise who suppress it do so at the risk of impoverishing their souls, an eventuality which for the most part they do not succeed in avoiding.

From the book Sudden Vengeance

“But none of us has the right to assess the value of a human existence. All must be held valuable, or none. The death of Christ and the death of Socrates,” Fen added dryly, “suggest that our judgments are scarcely infallible… And the evil of Nazism lay precisely in this, that a group of men began to differentiate between the value of their fellow-beings, and to act on their conclusions. It isn’t a habit which I, for one, would like to encourage.”

From the book Swan Song

Fen sighed. “We are all becoming standardized and normal, Nigel. The divine gift of purely nonsensical speech and action is in atrophy. Would you believe it, a pupil of mine had the impertinence the other day to tick me off for reading him passages regarding the Fimble Fowl and the Quangle-Wangle as an illustration of pure poetic inventiveness; I put him in his place all right.” In the semi-darkness his eye became momentarily lambent with remembered satisfaction. “But there’s no eccentricity nowadays – none at all.”

From the book The Case of the Gilded Fly

Euthanasia, Cadogan thought: they all regard it as that, and not as wilful slaughter, not as the violent cutting-off of an irreplaceable compact of passion and desire and affection and will; not as a thrust into unimagined and illimitable darkness.

From the book The Moving Toyshop