" With the usual snarls and sneers he read the dismal unreal news briefs from the outside world, terse by-the-way accounts of coups and famines, scandals and indictments, riots and revolutions. In everything he read he saw confirmation of what he knew: that the truth was everywhere suppressed, fakery in gross but temporary triumph. In Africa as in Russia, in politics as in culture, the appalling pattern held: Lying mediocrity prospered while deep honesty could only fume and seethe and starve, and so it would continue until there was a Liberator clear-eyed enough to show the world its vileness, and strong and cruel enough to root the vileness out. "

― Laurence Shames , Scavenger Reef (Key West, #2)