Daniel Muresan

“I have never admitted this to anyone, but I did not fight back when Hajji Salman or anyone else came to rape me. I just closed my eyes and wished for it to be over. People tell me all the time, “Oh, you are so brave, you are so strong,” and I hold my tongue, but I want to correct them and tell them that, while other girls punched and bit their attackers, I only cried. “I am not brave like them,” I want to say, but I worry what people would think of me. Sometimes it can feel like all that anyone is interested in when it comes to the genocide is the sexual abuse of Yazidi girls, and they want a story of a fight.”
― Nadia Murad, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State

“Much of it they support with verses from the Koran and medieval Islamic laws, which ISIS uses selectively and expects its followers to take literally. It is a horrible, stunning document. But ISIS is not as original as its members think it is. Rape has been used throughout history as a weapon of war. I never thought I would have something in common with women in Rwanda—before all this, I didn’t know that a country called Rwanda existed—and now I am linked to them in the worst possible way, as a victim of a war crime that is so hard to talk about that no one in the world was prosecuted for committing it until just sixteen years before ISIS came to Sinjar.”
― Nadia Murad, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State

“The history of central Africa before the European arrival was as filled with wars and conquests as Europe’s own, and even during Leopold’s rule not all the Congo’s violence was between colonizer and colonized. Because so many Congo peoples had earlier fought among themselves, the Force Publique was often able to ally itself with one ethnic group to defeat another. But sooner or later the first group found itself subdued as well. With their forces stretched thin over a huge territory, Leopold’s commanders made clever use of this shifting pattern of alliances. In the end, though, their superior firepower guaranteed victory—and a history written by the victors.”
― Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

“Henceforth the Orthodox shunned St. Sophia as “nothing better than a Jewish synagogue or a heathen temple”
― Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West