Dino

“Neighbors turned surly; petty jealousies flared into denunciations made to the SA—the Storm Troopers—or to the newly founded Geheime Staatspolizei, only just becoming known by its acronym, Gestapo (GEheime STAatsPOlizei), coined by a post office clerk seeking a less cumbersome way of identifying the agency. The Gestapo’s reputation for omniscience and malevolence arose from a confluence of two phenomena: first, a political climate in which merely criticizing the government could get one arrested, and second, the existence of a populace eager not just to step in line and become coordinated but also to use Nazi sensitivities to satisfy individual needs and salve jealousies. One study of Nazi records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans denounced one another with such gusto that senior Nazi officials urged the populace to be more discriminating as to what circumstances might justify a report to the police. Hitler himself acknowledged, in a remark to his minister of justice, “we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”
― Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

“Ella conocía, pues lo había sentido en carne propia, lo poderosa que podía ser una mirada.”
― Laura Esquivel, Como agua para chocolate

“I know some in the family disagree with my views, but my views are who I am, what I am. You have never told me to change them; you are not guilty of that crime. I, on the other hand, am at fault for shutting you out of my life because I did not accept that you too have your views, which make you different from me, but nonetheless still family, still loved.”
― Jana Petken, The Guardian of Secrets

“I miss my suits...”
― Eoin Colfer