Recruits to Operation 40 were hand-picked by José Sanjenis Perdomo, said to be the doorman at the Dakota on December 8, 1980, the day Beatle John Lennon was assassinated.
“Character and motivation are not static qualities; they undergo growth and change in lives normally marked by crucial junctures and times of future-determining decision. Moreover, the selfhood or (in Erikson’s phrase) “psychosocial identity” formed in youth has a prospective or programmatic dimension. It comprises not simply an individual’s sense of who and what he is, but also his goals—his clear or inchoate beliefs about what he can, should, and will achieve. Hence later biographical vicissitudes cannot but impinge upon personality profoundly. Fulfillment or non-fulfillment of the inner life-scenario necessarily affects the individual’s relationship to himself, and this is something that lies at the core of personality. It is likewise bound to affect his relations with other persons significant to him and thereby, perhaps, his and their lives as a whole.”
― Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929
― Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929
“Galen expounded upon Hippocrates’s theory by teaching that excess humors needed expelling from the body, typically via bloodletting, vomiting, sneezing, or urination.”
― The Byzantine Empire and the Plague: The History and Legacy of the Pandemic that Ravaged the Byzantines in the Early Middle Ages
― The Byzantine Empire and the Plague: The History and Legacy of the Pandemic that Ravaged the Byzantines in the Early Middle Ages
“Real intelligence in politics, as in science, is the ability to recognize connections that are not necessarily obvious, to see relationships—seeing the interconnectedness of all life, all peoples, and all wars. Real intelligence is the ability to understand that when you unleash a destructive force in one place, it affects all mankind destructively, including those who unleash it.”
― The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy
― The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy
“The so-called War on Terror was, in reality, a War using Religion, or the intensity of religious feelings of populations.”
― The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy
― The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy
“The grievances felt by the peasant were many and deep, and he was not always averse to voicing them or even to acting upon them violently. But he typically vented his feelings of protest upon the immediate agents of misfortune—above all the landlord—and exempted the tsar himself from blame. For was not the tsar surrounded by ministers and counselors who deceived him and kept him in ignorance of the people’s sufferings? Such was the peasant’s line of reasoning, and it must have imparted a special poignancy to another of his proverbs: “God is high above, and the tsar is far away.”
― Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929
― Stalin as Revolutionary: A Study in History and Personality, 1879-1929
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