You and I are victims of the same disease. We're fighting the same war, just different battles in different theaters, and it's way too late for me to hate you for anything, because we're the same damn thing. My soul, your conscience, whatever's left ...
The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who n...
To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connec...
When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of ‘greatness.’ ‘Grea...
And what is justice? The princess thought of that proud word 'justice'. All the complex laws of man centered for her in one clear and simple law—the law of love and self-sacrifice taught us by Him who lovingly suffered for mankind though He Himself...
Here's my advice to you: don't marry until you can tell yourself that you've done all you could, and until you've stopped loving the women you've chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you'll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you...
Then as now much time was spent arguing about the rights of women, husband-and-wife relationships and freedom and rights within marriage, but Natasha had no interest in any such questions. Questions like these, then as now, existed exclusively for pe...
One must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm alive and it's not my fault, which means I must somehow go on living the best I can, without bothering anybody, until I die.' 'But what makes you live? With such thoughts, you'll sit withou...
But all these hints at foreseeing what actually did happen on the French as well as on the Russian side are only conspicuous now because the event has justified them. If the event had not come to pass, these hints would have been forgotten, as thousa...
Society can give its young men almost any job and they'll figure how to do it. They'll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it ask...
If we cannot defeat the assassin, then we must remove his reason for attacking. If we can capture or eliminate his employers, then perhaps we can invalidate whatever contract binds him. Last we knew, he was employed by the Parshendi.” “Great,” ...
We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting t...
I remember when my aunt died, the thing that pissed me off the most was going to get groceries the next day and seeing all those people who didn't care... didn't understand why I was so upset when I saw her brand of cigarettes behind the counter.
What happend to her? To Miranda?' Ulysses shrugged. 'What happens to most children. She got sick, and never got better.' 'And your wife?' 'The same.' 'But you said you were married,' said Will, glancing down at Ulysses's ring, smooth and lustrous in ...
A southwest blow on ye and blister you all o'er!' 'The red plague rid you!' 'Toads, beetles, bats, light on you!' 'As wicked dew as e'er my mother brushed with raven's feather from unwholesome fen drop on you.' 'Strange stuff' 'Thou jesting monkey th...
And for once, Donald Rumsfeld, in the news at the time over the Iraq war made sense to me: "As we know," he said, famously, "there are known knowns-things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns-things we know we don't know. But there ...
What if making peace with our warring hearts—peace within—is the first step to world peace?
The bells cease, and the power goes from me, and I descend again to the world of the living; and if in some foolish confiding moment I try to explain why I want to re-live those old days, to tear the Truth out of the past so that all men shall see pl...
Women particularly should concern themselves with peace because men by nature are more foolhardy and headstrong, and their overwhelming desire to avenge themselves prevents them from foreseeing the resulting dangers and terrors of war. But woman by n...
Life was a bloody battlefield until I conquered the enemy and won the war. Now, life is a journey, and I am a warrior. Prepared for anything and weakened by nothing. There are hills and dales, mountains and plateaus, blind spots and brilliant vistas,...
Are you preparing for another war, Plutarch?" I ask. "Oh, not now. Now we're in a sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated," he says. "But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid bei...
