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121 " the young daughter of Sejanus is taken away to be killed. “What have I done?” Tacitus has her say. “Where are you taking me? I won’t do it again. "
― Clive James , Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
122 " We have heard that voice before, but it was later: it was only yesterday, in the Ukraine, at one of the Dubno shooting pits, "
123 " 1942. All the victims were naked. The German engineer Hermann Graebe recalled one moment particularly. “I still clearly remember a dark-haired, slim girl who pointed to herself as she passed close to me and said, ‘Twenty-three. "
124 " The wretched of the earth get no help from witch doctors, and when academic language gets beyond shouting distance of ordinary speech, voodoo is all it is. "
125 " What is the use of being moral in a night-cellar, or wise in Bedlam? —WILLIAM HAZLITT, "
126 " Marc Bloch was born in 1886, fought in World War I, "
127 " But we should be cautious when we spot comfort creeping into the historic memory: if it climbs the wall like a stain, it could be a sign that the truth is being drowned. "
128 " and took up arms again as a Resistance fighter in World War II. He was caught, tortured and executed in 1944. "
129 " the damaging notion that obscure is the way philosophy should sound. "
130 " (Sartre, who respected Aron’s credentials—Aron, unlike Sartre, had always been the kind of star student who actually read the books—took particular care to discredit his opinions: a potent endorsement.) "
131 " The less comprehensible he was, the more responsible he was held to be. Here was no lightweight. "
132 " Sartre and Camus were only two of the many thinkers about politics who, being gentiles, could stay in Paris and think about politics there if they chose. It was a dubious privilege. "
133 " more typical essay is the one on Karl Kraus, of which Kraus confessed that the only thing he understood was that it was about him. "
134 " Apart from the brave few who went underground and fought at the risk of their lives, the French intellectuals gave the Nazis little trouble, and were morally compromised as a consequence. "
135 " the men sit around in the square scratching their crotches and dreaming up their next war. "
136 " Swearing by European norms of honour, it negotiated with democratically elected war criminals. "
137 " the NATO aircraft that are held to be the worst thing in the world by those who have no idea how bad the world can get. "
138 " Whoever said “Wagner’s music isn’t as bad as it sounds” was as wrong as he was funny, "
139 " a system of belief which confused the desirable and the inevitable was still a dogma. "
140 " Too many milieux injure an adaptable sensibility. There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue. —JEAN COCTEAU, LE POTOMAK "