#ed

Seventy years ago this November, Vladimir Lenin created the modern totalitarian state, transforming simpler forms of tyranny into history's most sophisticated apparatus of rule by terror. ↗

— Michael Johns

#apparatus #created #forms #history #into

With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy. ↗

— Michael Johns

#american #appropriately #central #crisis #decency

But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer. ↗

— Adam Johnson

#certain #characters #dictated #farmer #fisherman

The reader feels as if he is in Chongjin, where starving people ate the bark off trees; or atop Mount Taesong with the elite of Pyongyang, whose existence is a mix of sadism and whimsy; or with the masses who are bombarded day and night with the propaganda of North Korea's alternate reality. ↗

— Adam Johnson

#ate #bark #bombarded #day #elite

I'd known that the visit would be highly scripted and that genuine interactions with citizens wouldn't be possible, since it's illegal for them to speak with foreigners. Still, I'd thought I'd had a unique look at North Korea, only to discover I was wrong. ↗

— Adam Johnson

#discover #foreigners #genuine #had #highly

I feel incompetent to perform duties... which have been so unexpectedly thrown upon me. ↗

— Andrew Johnson

#duties #feel #i #i feel #incompetent

I guess I kind of lived in a fairytale world... looking at everything through rose-colored glasses. I probably always will, to a certain extent. ↗

— Sharon Tate

#certain #certain extent #everything #extent #fairytale

The thing about getting older is the injuries. You just get injured more often. You take time off, you come back, you get injured again and you never get in shape. ↗

— Allen Johnson

#again #back #come #get #getting

I promised to run the most open and transparent administration in Britain. That is why, with this brutally honest and unprecedented progress report, I am determined to level with Londoners. ↗

— Boris Johnson

#am #britain #brutally #determined #honest

Ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century, and it was called Wiff-waff! And there, I think, you have the difference between us and the rest of the world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner; we looked at it an saw an opportunity to play Wiff-waff. ↗

— Boris Johnson

#between #called #century #difference #dining