#ii

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces. You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew. I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. ↗

— Iain Pears

#civilization #denunciation #evil #good #jews

* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore. ↗

— George Orwell

#hypocrisy #journalism #poland #stalin #warsaw-uprising

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead. ↗

— Neal Stephenson

#humor #internet #neal #stephenson #wwii

Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love. ↗

— Philippa Gregory

#henry-viii #historical-fiction #love

The one who forgives never brings up the past to that person's face. When you forgive, it's like it never happened. True forgiveness is complete and total. ↗

— Louis Zamperini

#forgiveness #forgives #god #jesus #wwii

There’s nothing funny about war. Well, aside from this joke Orafoura told me: What did WWI say to WWII? I wish I could tell you the punch line, but the restaurant was so noisy that I didn’t hear it. But I laughed anyway, because I’ll bet it was pretty funny. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#humor #war #wwi #wwii #funny

Goddammit! How does the world keep spinning with women on the planet?" Ian St. John in THE POMPEII SCROLL ↗

— Jacqueline LaTourrette

#italy #paris #pompeii #rome #suspense

Well they're pissed off and they're hungry. I was kind of busy trying not to get my brains eaten. They seemed pretty adamant about the brain-eating thing. Then they're going to IKEA, I guess ↗

— Christopher Moore

#chrisptopher-moore #humor #business

It is well to remember that the stomach governs the world," wrote Churchill when planning the feeding of his troops on the north-west Indian frontier at the tail-end of the nineteenth century. ↗

— Cita Stelzer

#food #world-war-ii #food

Thinking there had to be a better way was a brilliant stroke of serendipity! ↗

— Lorii Myers

#business #business-start-up #business-success #customer-service #improvement