“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.”
Source: Hitch 22: A Memoir
“In wine is truth, and the truth had all come out, "that is, all the uncleanness of his coarse and envious heart"!”
Source: Crime and Punishment
“My lord, will you be true?
Who, I? Alas, it is my vice, my fault:
Whiles others fish with craft for great opinion,
I with great truth catch mere simplicity;
Whilst some with cunning gild their copper crowns,
With truth and plainness I do wear mine bare.
Fear not my truth: the moral of my wit
Is "plain and true"; there's all the reach of it.”
Source: Troilus and Cressida
“Craigengelt, you are either an honest fellow in right good earnest, and I scarce know how to believe that; or you are cleverer than I took you for, and I scarce know how to believe that either.”
Source: the bride of Lammermoor
“When we look back from the vantage point of sobriety, many of us realize that when drinking we often felt like a fake, a fraud, and a phony. That’s because we were. – p. 74”
Source: Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety
“He came to chat with me the day of my being discharged, advising that I not stay at the dog fight until the last dog was dead. I was a kid and made little counsel. Now that I am a bigger kid, I see the value--belatedly--added. Yet I also see the loss of life in the protecting, first of all, of oneself. Better to give oneself away. Dead f*ck the dog and so on.”
“You have a beautiful laugh. Like the promise of tomorrow.”
Source: The Wrath and the Dawn
“But the inexplicability of the General's conduct dwelt much on her thoughts. That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own unassisted observation, already discovered; but why should he say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable. How were people, at that rate, to be understood?”
Source: Northanger abbey
“The truth is that we were so spiritually and morally bankrupt that we could not even see some of those lines: we stepped over them blindly. Other times we saw the lines alright, but we wanted to cross them. Alcohol gave us the false courage to do it and numbed our conscience as we did. Alcohol was the great enabler, and the great anesthetic. It wasn’t God who was dead. We were. – p. 116”
Source: Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety
“Orozco's despair was not just in finding himself poor, but in discovering that effort, honest intentions, and gentlemanly status had nothing to do with sucess in a commercial economy.”
Source: Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World