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Quote by David Grann

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The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

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David Grann
David Grann

David Grann is an American journalist known for his in-depth investigative reporting. Born on March 10, 1967, he graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Grann's work often delves into themes such as history, law, and crime. His books 'The Lost President' and 'Killers of the Flower Moon' have received widespread acclaim. more

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“I did not make any of the correct political reflections. I never do when things are happening. It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up in war or politics. I am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this damn nonsense to be over. Afterwards I can see the significance of events but while they're happening I merely want to be out of them.”

WarPoliticsDiscomfortHindsight
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“A motorcycle out on the trunk road, snarling cocky as a fighter plane, bypasses the village, heading up to London. The great balloons drift in the sky, pearl-grown, and the air is so still that this morning's brief snow still clings to the steel cables, white goes twisting peppermint-stick down thousands of feet of night. And the people who might have been asleep in the empty houses here, people blown away, some already forever... are they dreaming of cities that shine all over with lamps at night, of Christmases seen again from the vantage of children and not of sheep huddled so vulnerable on their bare hillside, so bleached by the Star's awful radiance? or of songs so funny, so lovely or true, that they can't be remembered on waking .dreams of peace time. "What was it like? Before the war?”

War
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“Dr. Rozsavölgyi tends to favor a powerful program over a powerful leader. Maybe because this is 1945. It was widely believed in those days that behind the War-all the death, savagery, and destruction-lay the Führer-principle. But if personalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques developed by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be no room for a terrible disease like charisma... that its rationalization should proceed while we had the time and resources.”

War
Book:Gravity’s Rainbow
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“What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of mar-kets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers.”

War
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