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Paul Rusesabagina

Paul Rusesabagina Books

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“I have since thought a great deal about how people are able to maintain two attitudes in their minds at once. Take the colonel: He had come fresh from a world of machetes, road gangs, and random death and yet was able to have a civilized conversation with a hotel manager over a glass of beer and let himself be talked out of committing another murder. He had a soft side and a hard side and neither was in absolute control of his actions. It would have been dangerous to assume that he was this way or that way at any given point in the day. It was like those Nazi concentration camp guards who could come home from a day manning the gas chambers and be able to play games with their children, put a Bach record on the turntable, and make love to their wives before getting up to kill to more innocents. And this was not the exception—this was the rule. The cousin of brutality is a terrifying normalcy. So I tried never to see these men in terms of black or white. I saw them instead in degrees of soft and hard. It was the soft that I was trying to locate inside them; once I could get my fingers into it, the advantage was mine. If sitting down with abhorrent people and treating them as friends is what it took to get through to that soft place, then I was more than happy to pour the Scotch.”

CompromiseMoral Complexity
Book:An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography
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“Kindness is not an illusion and violence is not a rule. The true resting state of human affairs is not represented by a man hacking his neighbor into pieces with a machete. That is a sick aberration. No, the true state of human affairs is life as it ought to be lived.”

MenHumansStatesKindnessPiecesViolenceOughtIllusionSickAffairNeighborHackingOrdinary ManAberrationMachetes
Book:An Ordinary Man: The True Story Behind Hotel Rwanda
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“A sad truth of human nature is that it is hard to care for people when they are abstractions, hard to care when it is not you or somebody close to you. Unless the world community can stop finding ways to dither in the face of this monstrous threat to humanity those words Never Again will persist in being one of the most abused phrases in the English language and one of the greatest lies of our time.”

PeopleWorldWayHumansHardCareFacesLyingHumanityLanguageCommunityHuman NatureFindingsThreatPhrasesOur TimePersistAbstractionEnglish LanguageMonstrousSad Truth
Book:An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography
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“Our time here on the earth is short, and our chance to make a difference is tiny. For me the grinding blocks of history came together in such a way that I was able to take what fragile defense I had and hold in place for seventy-six days. If I was able to give much it was only because I had some useful things from my life to give. I am a hotel manager...my job never changed, even in a sea of fire.”

IfsWayGivingAbleEarthTogetherJobsDifferencesChanceFireSeaChangedSixDefenseTinyBlockManagersOur TimeMaking A DifferenceHotelFragileSeventiesNever ChangeUseful Things
Book:An Ordinary Man: The True Story Behind Hotel Rwanda
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