Blade

“Consequently, if one’s luck is bad, one is liable to be increasingly consumed by feelings of resentment toward the agent or agents that one holds responsible for one’s victimhood, and this twisting of one’s soul in bitterness is a form of damage that the acknowledgment of the real conditions of academic life could have helped one to avoid or, at the very least, mitigate.”
― Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation & Politics as a Vocation

“That doesn’t matter. Gorky’s a vain man. We must bind him with cables to the Party,” replied Stalin.3 It worked: during the kulak liquidation, Gorky unleashed his hatred of the backward peasants in Pravda: “If the enemy does not surrender, he must be exterminated.” He toured concentration camps and admired their re-educational value. He supported slave labour projects such as the Belomor Canal which he visited with Yagoda, whom he congratulated: “You rough fellows do not realize what great work you’re doing!”4 Yagoda,”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

“The accelerating Japanese success was unforeseen on both sides. A captured British Engineer officer told Colonel Tsuji he had expected the defenses in northern Malaya to hold out for at least three months. “As the Japanese Army had not beaten the weak Chinese Army after four years’ fighting in China we did not consider it a very formidable enemy.”
― John Willard Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945

“Lieutenant Moore and his two companions were trying to give chase. They found to their amazement that the Zeros were faster and more maneuverable, climbing at an astounding rate. They had been assured there was no such thing as a good Japanese fighter plane, although exact data on these Zeros had been sent to the War Department by the brilliant and unorthodox Colonel Claire Chennault in the fall of 1940. The chief of the Flying Tigers had also elaborated in detail on ways whereby the heavier P-40 should be able to shoot down the faster Zero, but this information, which could have saved the lives of bewildered American pilots dying that moment, had been filed away. Chennault was too much of a maverick to be taken seriously by his superiors.”
― John Willard Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945