Nihilistic Librarian

“Polish leader Boleslaw Bierut, a charisma-free life support system for a bureaucrat's mustache.”
― Daniel Kalder, The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy

“This is not to say that torture mechanically reshapes all individuals to make them capable of greater cruelty. But scholars of psychopathology, like the great Simon Baron-Cohen, have found strong links that show enduring trauma can cause a person to lose empathy. To lose empathy is to view other human beings as objects, which is necessary to the infliction of cruelty and violence upon them. Baron-Cohen’s research shows that torturing a person, rendering him an object, a vessel out of which intelligence can be extracted, radically dulls that person’s ability to focus on another person’s interests at the same time as his own.”
― Azadeh Moaveni, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS

“A spoonful of sugar can be as helpful in dealing with foreign diplomats as it is in child psychology, for these are not unrelated fields.”
― Madeleine Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“In 1918 Mao landed a job in a library, the ideal location for a cash strapped nascent megalomaniac in need of easy access to inspirational bad ideas.”
― Daniel Kalder, The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy