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Quote by J.M. Coetzee

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Tagebuch eines schlimmen Jahres

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J.M. Coetzee

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“It's awful. Every day I see buses full of kids arriving. They come from the poor areas, you can tell... first they convince them that the afterlife is even better than Disneyland, then they put them in a trance with all their songs... it's nuts! They hypnotize them and just toss them into battle. Absolute carnage. The key to paradise was for poor people. Thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefield with their keys around their necks.”

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“In the vast expanse of the Pacific, island hopping emerged as a stroke of strategic brilliance, enabling the Allied forces to bypass heavily fortified Japanese strongholds while securing key strategic points. This nimble and audacious approach not only conserved precious resources but also provided crucial bases for launching further offensives. Island hopping reshaped the trajectory of the Pacific War, illustrating the power of adaptability and innovation in the face of formidable adversaries.”

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“Language is never sufficient. There is not enough of it to make a true mirror of living. In this way, the soothing or afflictive effect of the stories we tell is not in whether we select the right words but in our proximity to what the right words might be. This is not some abstraction, but a very real expression of power–the privilege of describing a thing vaguely, incompletely, dishonestly, is inseparable from the privilege of looking away.”

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“What is the ethical legitimacy of any system in which one has to hope the most privileged sliver of global society decides, in large enough numbers, that a sufficient number of children have been murdered to warrant choosing a different brand of couscous? That enough migrants have been caged or drowned to make a particular vacation spot unappealing? That the well-being of Congolese children outranks the desire for ever more powerful smartphones?”

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“I am not a committed pacifist. I would not hold that it is under all imaginable circumstances wrong to use violence, even though use of violence is in some sense unjust. I believe that one has to estimate relative justices. But the use of violence and the creation of some degree of injustice can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment-which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously and with a good deal of scepticism that this violence is being exercised because a more just result is going to be achieved.”

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“Have you ever dealt with people who have lost everything in just an hour? In the morning you leave the house where your wife, your children, your parents live. You return and you find a smoking pit. Then something happens to you - to a certain extent you stop being human. You do not need any glory, money anymore; revenge becomes your only joy. And because you no longer cling to life, death avoids you, the bullets fly past. You become a wolf.”

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