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Ollenurb

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Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

bookshelves: currently-reading, science

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Oct 01, 2022 12:09PM

“It is the writer's duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader's civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one's eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished.”
― Vasily Grossman, The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays

tags: duty, reading, truth, writing

22 likes

“And it was not merely tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, but hundreds of millions of people who were the obedient witnesses of this slaughter of the innocent. Nor were they merely obedient witnesses: when ordered to, they gave their support to this slaughter, voting in favour of it amid a hubbub of voices. There was something unexpected in their degree of obedience... The extreme violence of the totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

tags: facism, holocaust, human-nature, stalinism, terror, totalitarianism

29 likes

“...neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory or infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store --- hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labor camp --- they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man's eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be...”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

19 likes

“I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never by conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

130 likes