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“Call it a testing,” Cassagnac said, “or a distillation. Survival of a few, which will include an increased percentage of the most genuinely committed. Before he himself was executed, Yezhov of the NKVD used to say, ‘Better that ten innocent people should die than that one traitor should go undetected.’”
it is the indispensable agents who are always the first to be purged, because their very existence proves an inadequacy in the Party as a homogenous whole.”
the Arab proverb: When the camel kneels down in exhaustion, out come the knives.
this man today had used the word hatif. Admittedly it was as common a word for telephone as the derivative tilifon, but in old Arab folklore a hatif was a mysterious voice from out of the night that foretold the death of some prominent figure.
‘When thine enemy extends his hand to thee, cut it off if thou canst, else kiss it.’
the cheery greeting of the American OSS men in London during the war: Is anything okay?
