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57574dc Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive. feeling pettiness Sebastian Faulks
6d8c5b9 Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces. You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew. I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. civilization denunciation evil good jews nazis ordinariness pettiness resentment war wwii Iain Pears
c437587 "Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn't quite recognize", Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I 'gave' a farewell party for Martin Walker of the argumentation betrayal bill-clinton diana-princess-of-wales england friendship journalism london martin-walker-reporter marty-peretz mother-teresa new-york nightline oxford pettiness politics presidency-of-bill-clinton sidney-blumenthal television the-guardian the-new-republic united-states university-of-oxford Christopher Hitchens
d2495c5 Bloomberg does not support the measure to silence the useless and maddening car alarm: he would rather impose himself on people than on mechanical devices. big-government car-alarms cars law mayoralty-of-michael-bloomberg michael-bloomberg pettiness tyranny Christopher Hitchens
f4ba746 This terrible smallness of men was bigger than him, bigger than anything. humankind pettiness Dennis Lehane
d020cde He is, or has been, in many ways a great man. But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal. normality oddness pettiness Umberto Eco