Thunder At Twilight Quotes

“Contemporary warfare, then, is best practiced by the professional serial killer.”
― Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

“More than ever, the “free market” turns neighbors into rivals and neighborhoods into covert battlegrounds.”
― Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

“No wonder we sense that the precipice is ubiquitous and perennial, encircling each of us individually. A related precariousness marks our entire culture. More than ever, the “free market” turns neighbors into rivals and neighborhoods into covert battlegrounds. Here, often under a veneer of cocktail-party manners, consumerist gladiators contend in chronic one-upmanship, each desperate to escape the pit of loserdom by pushing down the others. TV reality shows are so popular for all too good a reason: their “you’re fired!” mercilessness reflects the take-no-prisoners zeitgeist of our society as a whole. Can we, finally, one hundred years after those fatal shots in Sarajevo, learn from anthropologists and live socially, as a social species should? Can we narrow the chasm not just between nations, but between the citizen and citizen within each nation? This, I grant, is a much harder thing to accomplish in life than to advocate on paper. But it is easier than domesticating the abyss.”
― Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

“He quite literally occupied it. At the end of a long oaken table near the window of the Writing Room was “the Hitler Chair.” It had the best light for painting postcards. Nobody but Adolf dared sit there. Everybody honored his obsession with the chair, partly out of gratitude: If a Männerheim tenant fell short of his week’s rent, Hitler was amazingly fast in organizing a collection.”
― Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

“Here was not only the dynamic of primeval myth. Here was the drama of the Eucharist and the plot of Easter, explored by a pen in the Berggasse, scratching on into the night.”
― Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914

“Actually he did not need to earn a penny. By 1913 his mother and his aunt had left him two fair-size legacies. He kept both secret. Nobody in the Männerheim suspected him of an income that could have easily paid for quarters at a comfortable hotel.”
― Frederic Morton, Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914