Medusa

“It was also shameful: when a shameful thing is done to you, the shamefulness rubs off on you. You feel dirtied.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“a vivid, wonderful world so full of winter and spring, warm rain and cold snow, adventures and contentments, good things and bad. How often you will have me near you when wood smoke drifts across the wind, or the first tulips arrive, or the sky darkens in a summer storm…. Think of me today, and in the days to come, as I am thinking of you this minute, not gone or alone or dead, but part of the earth beneath you, part of the air around you, part of the heart that must not be lonely.”
― Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in Africa, 1942-1943

“Why do we expend so much time and money preserving the memory of the short-duration wars in which European powers were involved; and so little, relatively speaking, remembering the kind of wars Butler fought—protracted, decades-long conflicts in the Americas, Asia, and Africa that have been the most common mode of warfare throughout U.S. history? And why does America celebrate its generals who oversaw death and destruction on a massive scale, while forgetting the exceptional few who spent their later years trying to stop them?”
― Jonathan M. Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire

“Hitler,” he had said, “is not a creator of national values. He’s a usurper. He has plundered the German nation’s industrial culture and zeal for work. He’s like an ignorant gangster who has stolen a magnificent car built by a brilliant scientist.”
― Vasily Grossman, The People Immortal