Life & Wisdom Quote by Dean Koontz

Koontz is picking a fight with the moral mood music of the late 20th century: the idea that everything is “relative,” that judgment is just prejudice in nicer packaging. The first sentence doesn’t merely describe a “century”; it indicts an education in neutrality, a cultural training regimen that treats values like consumer options. “One way of looking… is as valid as another” is phrased like a civics lesson, but it lands like a horror writer’s warning label: if you flatten every worldview into equivalence, you lose the ability to name monsters.

The punch comes in the second line. “True evil” isn’t a theological claim so much as a narrative necessity. Koontz’s fiction runs on the conviction that some acts aren’t complicated, they’re predatory; some people aren’t misunderstood, they’re dangerous. Saying the idea of evil has been “blown away” suggests not a thoughtful evolution but an explosion - a forceful erasure, collateral damage from intellectual fashions (postwar skepticism, therapeutic culture, “understanding” as an automatic virtue). The subtext: when a society prides itself on refusing to judge, it quietly hands power to those who benefit from being judged least.

Contextually, this reads like a backlash to post-1960s pluralism and postmodern suspicion of absolutes, filtered through a popular novelist’s lived relationship to fear, crime, and vulnerability. Koontz isn’t arguing for cruelty; he’s arguing that moral clarity is a form of public safety. In his framing, relativism isn’t tolerance - it’s disarmament.