John

“The price of freedom is high — far higher than that of slavery. And it is not paid in gold, nor in blood, nor in the most noble sacrifices, but in cowardice, in prostitution, in treachery, and in everything that is rotten in the human soul.”
― Curzio Malaparte, The Skin

“It’s not bad people I fear so much as good people. When a person is sure that he is good, he is nearly hopeless; he gets cruel- he believes in punishment.”
― Clarence Darrow

“There's a proverb, a maxim, that runs, 'The dead man is dead; let's give a hand to the living.' Now, you say that to a man from the North, and he visualizes the scene of an accident with one dead and one injured man; it's reasonable to let the dead man be and to set about saving the injured man. But a Sicilian visualizes a murdered man and his murderer, and the living man who's to be helped is the murderer.”
― Leonardo Sciascia, To Each His Own

“It falls to the lot of even the most glorious flags to be thrown in the mud. Glory, what men call glory, is often thick with mud.”
― Curzio Malaparte, The Skin