Chuck LoPresti

“I asked myself whether a life devoid of any affection, of any goal, a life one fills with a thousand trifles intended to relieve its monotony, populated with human beings one seeks out in order not to be alone and whom one flees to avoid being bored by them, whether such a life isn't ridiculous, whether anything whatsoever wouldn't be preferable.”
― Emmanuel Bove, A Winter's Journal

“You, up there: I hate you waking and sleeping. I will hate and curse you in the hour of my death. I will hate and curse you from my grave, and it will be your children and your children’s children who will have to bear my curse. I have no other weapon against you but this curse, I know that it withers the heart of him who utters it, I do not know if I will survive your downfall.

But this I know, that a man must hate this Germany with all his heart if he really loves it. I would ten times rather die than see you triumph.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair

“Some of ours is so crooked they can't lay in a birth only when the trains making a curve.”
― Ring Lardner, Lardner on Baseball

“Ah, now, really, gentlemen, this is a little late. You made this monster, and as long as things were going well you gave him whatever he wanted. You turned Germany over to this arch-criminal, you swore allegiance to him by every incredible oath he chose to put before you—you, officers of the Crown, all of you. And so you made yourselves into the Mamelukes of a man who carries on his head responsibility for a hundred thousand murders and who is the cause of the sorrow and the object of the curses of the whole of the world.
And now you are betraying him, as yesterday you betrayed the Republic, and as the day before yesterday you betrayed the Monarchy.
[...]
For years, these men were the cover for every treasonable act, every orgy of rape and murder, because Hitler allowed them prominence once again in a debased, Prussianised Germany. They defended him, verbally and physically, every time he committed one of his criminal acts, they went blithely on past the suffering of all the bombing victims, the prisoners in the concentration camps, and the religious persecutors, and they hummed a little tune to words like ‘Germany’ or the ‘German spirit’, because a different regime would have meant the end of their power...
And now that the firm is going bankrupt, they are betraying it to provide themselves with a political alibi— just as they betrayed all the others who were no longer useful in their drive to get and hold power.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair