Philip Short > Quotes

“For if there is one lesson worth retaining from the travails of the Cold War and the miseries it brought in its wake, it is the folly of seeking simple answers to complicated questions. It is a lesson which governments still show no sign of learning.”
― Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

“When we contemplate what happened in Cambodia, we are looking not at some exotic horror story but into darkness, into the foul places of our own souls.”
― Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

“having a line of coloured sand drawn around Phnom Penh to give the city magical protection.”
― Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

“his youngest child, a four-year-old girl whom he adored, had suddenly fallen ill and lay dying.”
― Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

“France says no to the despair which pushes towards violence those deprived of any other way to make themselves heard. It says no to the attitude which tramples underfoot public freedoms only to outlaw afterwards those who take up arms to defend those freedoms.”
― Philip Short, Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity

“By then Putin had left Dresden. Sometime in mid January, he had been summoned to Berlin for a meeting with a KGB general from the newly renamed Directorate Z,”
― Philip Short, Putin

“The corollary of this visceral desire to avoid confrontation at all costs is that debate and argument do not function as a means of resolving differences. Between the extremes of acquiescence and violence there is no middle ground. The”
― Philip Short, Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare

“Another Cercle member remembered Sary advising him to masturbate instead of wasting his time with young women.”
― Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare

“In the century-and-a-half since the Emperor Qianlong had dismissed King George III's request for trade facilities with the contemptuous words, ‘China has … no need of the manufactures of outside barbarians’, the balance of power in the world had altered. China had stagnated, its wealth haemorrhaging away in bloody rebellions and civil unrest. Europe, through the Industrial Revolution, developed undreamed-of power and irresistible pressures for expansion. Conflict between the two was inevitable.”
― Philip Short, Mao: The Man Who Made China

“The Vietnamese never asked themselves, any more than had the French, whether the Cambodians wanted the new system they were introducing. They acted in the unassailable certitude of a superior truth.”
― Philip Short, Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare

“For if there is one lesson worth retaining from the travails of the Cold War and the miseries it brought in its wake, it is the folly of seeking simple answers to complicated questions.”
― Philip Short, Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare

“Revolutions, even as they destroy, build on the model of what has gone before.”
― Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare