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Quote by Erich Maria Remarque

“There was always a screen behind which one could hide— a superior who in turn had his superior— orders, instructions, duties, commands— and finally the many-headed monster, morale, necessity, hard reality, responsibility, or whatever it was called— there was always a screen behind which to evade the simple law of humanity.”

Quote by Erich Maria Remarque

Book:Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country
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Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country

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Author

Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque

German author best known for his novel 'All Quiet on the Western Front', which vividly portrays the horrors of World War I. His works are characterized by a realistic style and have had a profound impact on literature. more

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“Indifference This hate has blossomed like a living love, grieving, watching its own exhaustion. It seeks a face, it seeks flesh, as though it were love. The worldly flesh and the voices that spoke are dead, all has shuddered away, all life hangs on a voice. Days pass in bitter ecstasy to the sad caress of the voice that returns and drains the blood from our faces. Not without sweetness that voice returns to the mind exhausted and trembling: once it trembled for me. But the flesh does not tremble. Only love could set it alight, this hate seeks it out. All the possessions, all the flesh and all the voices in the world cannot equal the burning caress of that body and those eyes. In the bitter ecstasy that kills itself, this hate still finds each day a glance, a broken word, and grasps them, hungrily, like love.”

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“Борьба имеет свою прелесть. Бороться - значит жить, пусть борьба приносит горе, пусть она ранит, - все лучше, чем беспросветный мрак отвращения, яд презрительной замкнутости, холод тех, кто отрекся от борьбы, чем смерть сердца, которая зовется равнодушием.”

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“Watchman, what of the night? So many victims in so many places need help. We need, above all, to be shaken out of our indifference—the greatest source of danger in the world. For, remember: the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. The opposite of faith is not arrogance by indifference; the opposite of culture is not ignorance but indifference; the opposite of art is not ugliness but indifference. And the opposite of peace is indifference to both peace and war—indifference to hunger and persecution, to imprisonment and humiliation, indifference to torture and persecution.”

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“Many of the haters call me mental, which, by the way, is quite true, both metaphorically and clinically. It's true clinically because I am a person on the spectrum with OCD, and metaphorically, because I refuse to accept the sanity of unaccountability as the right way of civilized life. I am not going to glorify the issues of mental illness by saying that it's a super power or that it makes a person special. On the contrary, it makes things extremely difficult for a person. But guess what! Indifference is far more dangerous than any mental illness. Because mental illness can be managed with treatment, but there is no treatment for indifference, there is no treatment for coldness, there is no treatment for apathy. So, let everyone hear it, and hear it well - in a world where indifference is deemed as sanity what's needed is a whole lot of mentalness, a whole lot of insanity, insanity for justice, insanity for equality, insanity for establishing the fundamental rights of life and living for each and every human being, no matter who they are, what they are, or where they are.”

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“In late February 2024 I talk to a friend of mine, a Palestinian Canadian author whose debut novel, rejected by many publishers, seems to have finally found a home. He says he still doubts whether it'll actually go out into the world. But he takes some solace in the likelihood that, by next year or the year after, it won't just be Gaza that's on fire, but the whole world, so what difference does it make what one book does? We laugh, but I can't mount much of a counterargument. I know when an Arab says things like this, there's a natural impulse to believe he's talking about some great violent retribution, but I know what my friend means. A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.”

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Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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