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5e3c09b
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Spirituality can go hand-in-hand with ruthless single-mindedness when the individual is convinced his cause is just
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inquisition
middle-ages
religion
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Michela Wrong |
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ee5ef73
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Experience has taught that politics is a game played by conmen and hypocrites.
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Michela Wrong |
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d4e0f71
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Keep your head down, think small, look after yourself: these constituted the lessons of Leopold. The spirit, once comprehensively crushed, does not recover easily. For seventy-five years, from 1885 to 1960, Congo's population had marinated in humiliation. No malevolent witch-doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator.
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Michela Wrong |
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7d20689
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Bantu Philosophy: People cling to life and are not yet at the stage where they wil fight for the quality of that life. They feel as long as they are surviving, that is enough.
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Michela Wrong |
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f6f7817
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I could see their menfolk patrolling nervously up and down toting sub-machine guns and draped in cartridge belts. They were wearing their trademark sunglasses, those gold rimmed feminine accessories which should look comic on a man but instead manage to look as sinister as the wedding dresses and blonde wigs worn by Liberia's drugged fighters. They are the modern equivalent of the wooden masks donned around night fires by warriors preparing..
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Michela Wrong |
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8d030a9
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What constitutes charm? A presence, a capacity to command attention, an innate conviction of one's own uniqueness, combined, as often as not, with the more manipulative ability of making the interlocutor believe he has one's undivided attention and has gained a certain indefinable something from the encounter.
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Michela Wrong |