Blade > Blade's Quotes

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

“Mao used to boast that a nuclear attack on China would cost it much less than a similar attack on other countries because China could afford to lose tens of millions of its people and still be the most populous country on the planet. Mao accepted without any apparent remorse the death of more than forty million people in the famine of 1959–1962, which was a direct result of his economic policies. He was willing to endure the loss of thousands of China’s intellectuals, scientists, writers, artists, and technicians in the campaigns for political purity that he waged throughout his time in power. There were always enough people in China for a fresh start. The population was fungible.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“As we’ll see, there was an irony in this. The government’s claims were propagandistic exaggerations, which came to be widely disbelieved. But actually the government resisted far more than the Communists, who resisted very little and whose losses were a small fraction of those suffered by the KMT’s forces.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Warned by some of his advisers that Stalin would devour whole countries after the war, Roosevelt’s feeling was that “Stalin is not that kind of man.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Later he understood Zhou to be “a man as brilliant and ruthless as any the Communist movement has thrown up in this century,” but he “had a way of entrancing people, of offering affection, of inviting and seeming to share confidences. And I cannot deny that he won my affection completely.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“In retaliation, Zhou ordered the Red Squad to assassinate Gu’s entire family, some fifteen people, and this order was scrupulously carried out.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Mao assured Forman of the CCP’s democratic aspirations and its admiration of western values. “We are not striving for the social and political Communism of Soviet Russia,” he told him. “Rather, we prefer to think of what we are doing as something that Lincoln fought for in your Civil War: the liberation of slaves.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Mao further assured Forman that “we believe in and practice democracy,” in contrast with what Mao called the “one-party dictatorship as practiced by the Kuomintang today.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“The next time American pilots bailed out into the hands of Communist troops was in Korea about five years later, and the reception this time was imprisonment and torture, which makes the level of wartime cooperation all the more amazing and the decline of the relationship into enmity all the more shocking and costly.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Contrary to the impression garnered by foreign visitors, an elaborate system of perquisites and privileges had developed in Yenan that seems remarkable given the Communists’ theoretical emphasis on material equality and the informality,”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Rectification Campaign, that Mao engineered in Yenan and that was designed both to indoctrinate the thousands who had flocked to Yenan and to eradicate his opponents inside the party. The long-range effect of this famous meeting was to reduce the magnificent art and culture of China, historically one of the greatest contributions to global culture ever made, to standardized, officially approved propaganda.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“the goal was not simply to make the thought-control target admit his errors and flaws but to so thoroughly destroy his sense of autonomous individuality that he feels gratitude and love for the leader who restored him to the correct path—Chairman Mao.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“The year 1945 in this sense marked the origin of a rivalry between the United States and China’s Communists that, like a recurring illness, has always reinstated itself, and has bedeviled the relations between the two sides even after periods of near-rhapsodic warmth and declarations of common interest, during which the suspicions and animosities of the past seem to have been put permanently to rest.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Was it wrong of him to believe that saving China meant not fighting Japan, which was nearly defeated anyway, but making sure that a Communist dictatorship didn’t position itself to take power once Japan had been disposed of by the valiant Americans?”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“It was a repetition of the familiar Communist pattern of seizing upon some incident, justifiably or otherwise, and embroidering thereon without regard to truth and accuracy to form the basis for an almost hysterical campaign of vituperation,” Marshall concluded wearily.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“Once Stalin had more than a million soldiers occupying Manchuria, the Chinese civil war became inevitable, because Mao understood that the central government no longer had the capability to eliminate him militarily. The irony, of course, is that the president of the United States, meeting with Stalin at Yalta, implored the Soviets to send their troops to Manchuria and that the Soviet invasion was facilitated by American Lend-Lease supplies.”
― Richard Bernstein, China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice

“The wounded Goering was given first aid by the Jewish proprietor of a nearby bank”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“Hitler had never made any secret of, was that if the party ever took over Germany it would stamp out a German’s personal freedom, including that of Dr. Schacht and his business friends.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“In Nazi parlance, “educated” meant “intimidated”—to a point where all would accept docilely the Nazi dictatorship and its barbarism.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“On the contrary, they supported it with genuine enthusiasm. Somehow it imbued them with a new hope and a new confidence and an astonishing faith in the future of their country.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“The Germans heard vaguely in their censored press and broadcasts of the revulsion abroad but they noticed that it did not prevent foreigners from flocking to the Third Reich and seemingly enjoying its hospitality.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“And many returned who if they were not converted were at least rendered tolerant of the “new Germany” and believed that they had seen, as they said, “positive achievements.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“A people who had so lightly given up their political and cultural and economic freedoms were not, except for a relatively few, going to die or even risk imprisonment to preserve freedom of worship.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’” he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

“A gigantic crowd of one million persons was gathered on the Maifeld to hear the two fascist dictators speak their pieces. Mussolini, orating in German, was carried away by the deafening applause—and by Hitler’s flattering words.”
― William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany