Wayne Larson

“What could be worse than not being at home in our own house? What hope do we have of finding rest outside of ourselves if we cannot be at ease within? Whether or not we appreciate them, we must always live in close proximity to our faculties: they are our greatest relatives and most faithful friends. And yet, as if they were resentful of the damage our imperfections have done to them, our faculties seem to be waging war upon us. Peace, peace, Christ says, my friends.”
― Teresa de Ávila, The Interior Castle

“There are such clergymen, no doubt, but I think they are not so common as to justify Miss Crawford in esteeming it their general character. I suspect that in this comprehensive and (may I say) commonplace censure, you are not judging from yourself, but from prejudiced persons, whose opinions you have been in the habit of hearing. It is impossible that your own observation can have given you much knowledge of the clergy. You can have been personally acquainted with very few of a set of men you condemn so conclusively. You are speaking what you have been told at your uncle's table.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“It was decades later that Rubel confessed that this U.S. plan for nuclear war he participated in reminded him of the Nazis’ plans for genocide. In his memoir, he referred to a time in an earlier world war when a group of Third Reich officials met at a lakeside villa in a German town called Wannsee. It was there, over the course of a ninety-minute meeting, that this group of allegedly rational men decided among themselves how to move forward with the genocide in a war they were presently winning—World War II—so as to ensure total victory for themselves. Millions of people needed to die, these Reich officials agreed.”
― Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario

“But above even that, he said, curse humanity, curse mankind that enjoys control of the mechanism whereby it may reduce and falsify the essence of things and make that reduced and false essence the cornerstone of the deepest laws of our existence.”
― László Krasznahorkai, War & War