Tim Johnson

“the army turned its tanks on the people and a terrible violence was born that would leave generations of Colombians looking over their shoulders in fear, waiting for the moment”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“The lust of conquest, when associated with religious fanaticism, has been the greatest scourge of the human race.”
― William Deans, History of the Ottoman Empire

“People above the line of bare subsistence in this age, and in all earlier ages, do not use the surplus which society has given them primarily for useful purposes. They do not seek to expand their lives, to live more wisely, intelligently, understandingly, but to impress other people with the fact that they have a surplus.”
― Stuart Chase

“In 1928, when field hands went on strike and bananas rotted on the stem, agents of the United Fruit Company in the guise of soldiers slaughtered their families with machine guns, leaving the plaza of Ciénaga blanketed with the dead, corpses that were cast into the sea. The survivors fled south only to be murdered in the Aracataca graveyard before the eyes of a desperate priest. As an infant, García Márquez rested in his cradle within earshot of the massacre. Years later, he was living as a student in a Bogotá boardinghouse just blocks from the Black Cat Café, where Jorge Gaitán was murdered. García Márquez watched as workers poured into the”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams