The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity.
We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.
There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.
Like all tools, modern technology has produced some wonderful moments in music and also some horrors.
You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.
It wasn't long before people discovered the final horrors of letting an urchin into Parliament.
As Albert Camus wrote, the doctor’s role is as a witness – to witness authentically the reality of humanity, and to speak out against the horrors of political inaction. . . The only crime equaling inhumanity is the crime of indifference, silence, and forgetting.
The Church must be all-powerful. You discover these horrors within institutions because predators find ways of hiding in plain sight.
Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts. . . genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation. . . the utter devotion of the Liberals to sentiment apart from reality. . . though free from wickedness or evil design, played a definite part in the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries [WWII]
There can be no doubt that distrust of words is less harmful than unwarranted trust in them. Besides, to distrust words, and indict them for the horrors that might slumber unobtrusively within them - isn’t this, after all, the true vocation of the intellectual?
If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on.
We humans have the capacity to wreak horrors on each other. But we also have the capacity to survive those horrors.
We will build our defenses beyond challenge, lest weakness invite challenge. We will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors.
What do you call a planet where bad guys stroll through life with success draped around their shoulders like a King’s cloak, while random horrors are visited upon the innocent heads of children? I call it Earth.
I mean science was blamed for all the horrors of World War I, just as it's blamed today for nuclear weapons and quite rightly.
God wants us to be in joy, God wants us to be happy. Because of this extraordinary consciousness and this great ability for wonder and marvel, and without denying any of the terrors and horrors of the world, we also have an obligation toward joy and toward miracle and excitement.
What I like to believe, and what I do firmly hold to, is that in us all we do have the ability to remain honorable, no matter what has been done to us. No matter what horrors we've witnessed.
It's just really tragic after all the horrors of the last 1,000 years we can't leave behind something as primitive as government-sponsored execution.
People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.
