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People need to see and hear the details of what is going on because their imagination is incapable of grasping general facts correctly. When a disaster consumes five million victims, this does not mean anything: the number is empty. However, if I show a single, individual man in his perfection, his faith, his hopes and his difficulties, if I show you how he dies, then you will remember this story forever. Erich Maria Remarque
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own. Aldous Huxley
children never learn as much as in the first three years of life. They learn, they live, but they never remember having learned or lived.
He’d lost everything a long time ago, and he never forgot. But he’d learned to be glad for life for its own sake; glad to live another day, and another, and another. Hungry, but alive to enjoy food another day. Cold, but alive to enjoy warmth when it came. Alone, but alive to enjoy company when it found him.
He heard because he had no choice. He didn’t listen, because he didn’t want to.
The war was not over for him. The war now possessed his body and his mind.
hate and fear are very alike and they’re great motivators, don’t you think?
Did you know that Heine wrote that where books are burned, it always ends in people being burned?”
But Arno knew it was a lie: he’d returned, true, but not in one piece. Maybe the bullet had hit him right where he kept his joy and had smashed it to bits.
After years of relative peace in the war, in the blink of an eye, her life had been reduced to that: to understanding that the only treasure worth anything is life.
They had been aware of the food shortages, of course, but deep inside they told themselves, if it doesn’t happen here, if we have what we need, everything’s fine; if bullets and bombs aren’t raining on us, we’re all right. Those poor other people, but us, we’re all right.
How was it possible that they didn’t understand that the fate of one was the fate of all?
How easy it was to turn a blind eye, whether to the government’s cruelty or the suffering of others.
while there was darkness, there were always faint rays of light for those ready to see.
Rudyard Kipling said that if history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man,” Solzhenitsyn
Social problems go beyond borders. The sores of the human race, these running sores that cover the globe, don’t stop at red or blue lines drawn on the map. —Victor Hugo,
