Charlie English > Quotes

“Every Autumn now my thoughts return to snow. Snow is something I identify myself with. Like my father, I am a snow person.”
― Charlie English

“In the nineteenth century, Fritjof Nansen wrote that skiing washes civilization clean from our minds by dint of its exhilarating physicality. By extension, I believe that snow helps strip away the things that don't matter. It leaves us thinking of little else but the greatness of nature, the place of our souls within it, and the dazzling whiteness that lies ahead.”
― Charlie English

“In this sense, Hitler´s painting supports [Hannah] Arendt´s theory of National Socialism--that it was defined by its banality and lack of empathy. The Nazis relied on the ability of people not to imagine themselves in someone else´s shoes. The lack of a connection was very much the point.”
― Charlie English, The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler's War on Art

“Poland was the most crucial of Eastern Bloc nations: when communism collapsed in 1989, this was the first domino to fall, and it was literature that won the war here, as the Polish dissident Adam Michnik maintained.”
― Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War

“Intellectual freedom is essential to human society—freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship.”
― Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature

“reservoir”
― Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature

“maintained. ‘We should build a monument to books,”
― Charlie English, The CIA Book Club: The Best Kept Secret of the Cold War