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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f3e84f0 | You don't have to be Southern to have good manners. And you don't have to be a Yankee to make a total ass of yourself. | Mary Kay Andrews | ||
| 841bf00 | Sometimes the people we think we know the best are the ones with secrets we can't even fathom. | Mary Kay Andrews | ||
| 39f6287 | Car la encore ces hommes se livraient a quelque chose de grotesque lorsqu'ils embetaient leur famille pour qu'elle leur achete un costume tout neuf pour leur proces. Les tribunaux ne prenaient jamais en consideration la tenue des inculpes. Ils auraient pu comparaitre dans des sacs a pommes de terre, les juges n'en avaient rien a faire. La seule chose qui comptait etait la couleur de leur peau et les chefs d'accusation. | Donald Goines | ||
| 459df1b | In return, the Vatican gave Hitler the formal endorsement he wanted. Article 16 of the Reichskonkordat required German bishops and cardinals to swear an oath of loyalty to the Third Reich. | Gerald Posner | ||
| acc3c07 | God's Bankers cuts through the masses of misinformation to present an unvarnished account of the quest for money and power in the Roman Catholic Church. No embellishment is needed. That real tale is shocking enough. | Gerald Posner | ||
| baabeda | A poem by Rudyard Kipling says derisively of people who despise soldiers and police that they make 'mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep.' You are likely to have a strong reaction pro or con to this sentiment and how Kipling expressed it, but you will not be able to defend your view with arguments that would convince someone who has the opposite reaction. If you are intellectually sophisticated you mare recognize that your convic.. | tommy unreliable-witnesses | Richard A. Posner | |
| 41df34a | It is not the practice of the Holy See to disclose information on the religious discipline of members of the clergy or religious according to canon law. | Gerald Posner | ||
| 0cf1aeb | Two days after he had appointed the special oversight commission, sixty-one-year-old Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, an APSA senior accountant, was arrested. Prosecutors charged he was the mastermind in helping friends avoid taxes on $26.2 million, some of it cash flown to Italy on a private jet from Switzerland. | Gerald Posner | ||
| cb5b987 | the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne published the results of an extensive study of international money laundering.9 The authors compared the banking systems of two hundred countries. The Vatican ranked in the top ten money laundering havens, behind Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and Liechtenstein, but ahead of Singapore. | Gerald Posner | ||
| 3b6b0bc | Berry's investigation was a searing indictment of how church officials in Louisiana buried reports of sexual abuse of minors and did their best to pay off victims to keep them silent. By the time his story ran, the tiny Lafayette diocese in which Gauthe had committed his crimes was deeply in the red from $4.2 million in confidential settlements to the families of nine victims, and $114 million in pending claims in another eleven lawsuits. | Gerald Posner | ||
| ca47e06 | The small group of Benedict supporters gathered that night were not simply upset at money matters gone awry. There was, as they discussed that evening, something that made most of them squirm. They had seen the proof of what one called a "gay lobby." The common bond for the gay clerics at the highest positions of the Curia was that they had abandoned their celibacy vows. The problem, the small group agreed, was that they often used sex as a.. | Gerald Posner | ||
| 40c9488 | When Ali Agca, a Turk, shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, both the target and the would-be killer were well within Vatican territory," wrote George Armstrong, the respected Rome correspondent for London's Guardian. "The Vatican was happy to have him arrested, tried and sentenced in Italy, and under Italian law, and his life sentence will be at the expense of the Italian taxpayer. The Vatican becomes another country only when it chooses to be." | Gerald Posner | ||
| cdabb03 | And a popular priest, Father Dyonisy Juricev, wrote in a leading newspaper that it was no longer a sin to kill Serbs or Jews so long as they were at least seven years old. | Gerald Posner | ||
| e8b2d47 | A supplementary 180-page U.S. government report issued that spring (June 2, 1998) provided more evidence that neutral countries, including the Vatican, had profited by hiding Nazi gold in their central banks.50 | Gerald Posner | ||
| 28fc0be | The same year as the Peron visit, American counterintelligence concluded that the Vatican as an institution--not merely as a group of scattered, rogue clerics--was helping high-ranking Nazis escape justice.94 | Gerald Posner | ||
| e0d556b | Now at this hour, when the cirrus clouds stretched like crimson ribbons high across the southwest sky, in such a hush that not even a playful eddy dared stir moss or palm fronds, the day died in calm and in beauty. | Pat Frank | ||
| dcb425d | Everybody cursed the Bolsheviks but nobody was prepared to do anything about them. | russian-revolution | Orlando Figes | |
| 5f0e9e1 | The 'noble savage' whom the Populists had seen in the simple peasant was, as Gorky now concluded, no more than a romantic illusion. And the more he experienced the everyday life of the peasant, the more he denounced them as savage and barbaric. | Orlando Figes | ||
| b9985c0 | Only a few miles from any city centre one would find oneself already in the backwoods, where there were bandits living in the forests, where roads turned into muddy bogs in spring, and where the external signs of life in the remote hamlets had remained essentially unchanged since the Middle Ages. Yet, despite living so close to the peasants, the educated classes of the cities knew next to nothing about their world. It was as exotic and alie.. | russia | Orlando Figes | |
| 99351dc | There is no sadder symbol of the crippling poverty in which millions of peasants were forced to live than the image of a peasant and his son struggling to drag a plough through the mud. | ploughing poverty russia | Orlando Figes | |
| 716be51 | The peasant also found another use for this sacred object. 'He says of the icon: "It's good for praying -- and you can cover the pots with it too." | Orlando Figes | ||
| 93cd44d | To the less privileged it was this arbitrariness that made the regime's power feel so oppressive. There were no clear principles or regulations which enabled the individual to challenge authority or the state. | Orlando Figes | ||
| dfcfde2 | Whereas in Western countries the constitution merely had to guarantee the rights of a per-existing civil society and culture, in Russia it also had to create these. It had to educate society - and the state itself - into the values and ideas of liberal constitutionalism. | Orlando Figes | ||
| cfa14a8 | The currents of modern civilization had somehow passed it by, and as he returned to it now, fresh from the sides of England and France, Sergei Semenov saw only familiar signs of backwardness and decay. | Orlando Figes | ||
| b7f0519 | The Provisional Government had lost effective military control of the capital a full two days before the armed uprising began. This was the essential fact of the whole insurrection: without it one cannot explain the ease of the Bolshevik victory. | insurrection russian-revolution | Orlando Figes | |
| f78ac59 | The remarkable thing about the Bolshevik insurrection is that hardly any of the Bolshevik leaders had wanted it to happen until a few hours before it began. | insurrection russian-revolution | Orlando Figes | |
| f5eefc5 | The word 'soviet' means 'council' in Russian (there was nothing particularly Communist about it until after 1917). | Orlando Figes | ||
| 4f143d6 | Lenin's Personal life was extraordinarily dull. He dressed and lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work and leisure. He liked everything to be neat and orderly. | dull lenin marxism provinvial-clerk russian-revolution | Orlando Figes | |
| 3d41786 | Pavlik denounced his father's crimes, and when Trofim shouted out, 'It's me, your father,' the boy told the judge: 'Yes, he used to be my father, but I no longer consider him my father. I am not acting as a son, but as a Pioneer. | Orlando Figes | ||
| 0411c97 | The only way, they argued, to prevent a revolution was to rule Russia with an iron hand. This meant defending the autocratic principle, the unchecked powers of the police, the hegemony of the nobility, and the moral domination of the Church, against the liberal and secular challenges of the urban-industrialize order. | Orlando Figes | ||
| ca07124 | Gorky called for the building of a monument to the young martyr, who, the writer said, had 'understood that a relative by blood may also be an enemy of the spirit, and that such a person is not to be spared'.69 | Orlando Figes | ||
| 1c9404b | The ancient bond between the tsarist state and Russian nationalism could be used to create powerful emotions when the enemy came from the heathen east. The Mongol invasion had left a powerful mark on the Russian psyche. It was expressed in a deep anxiety about the mixed Eurasian roots of the people and it's culture, which made it easy for an educated liberal to convince themselves that this war was nothing less than a defense of Russia's Eu.. | Orlando Figes | ||
| 742e7ec | We, the workers and inhabitants of St Petersburg, of various estates, our wives, our children, and our aged, helpless parents, come to THEE, O SIRE to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished; we are oppressed, overburdened with excessive toil, contemptuously treated . . . We are suffocating in despotism and lawlessness. O SIRE we have no strength left, and our endurance is at an end. We have reached that frightful moment when death.. | gapon | Orlando Figes | |
| 4284ede | The deeper the Whites moved into the steppe, the more they resorted to terror against a hostile population. Their Ice March left a trail of blood. It was perhaps unavoidable, given the Volunteers' desperate need for food and the reluctance of the peasants to give it to them. The Whites were stranded in a Red peasant sea. But there was also an element of sheer class war and revenge in their violence, as in so many acts of the White Terror, w.. | russian-revolution white-terror | Orlando Figes | |
| 1987f62 | I, Nikolai Ivanov, renounce my father, an ex-priest, because for many years he deceived the people by telling them that God exists, and that is the reason I am severing all my relations with him.77 | Orlando Figes | ||
| 6735b92 | Whereas land reform was the first act of the Bolsheviks, it was the last act of the Whites: that, in a peasant country, says it all. | russian-revolution whites | Orlando Figes | |
| 8a2fc8c | The moonlight was still floating on the waters, when men, looking from numberless decks towards the east, were able to hail the dawn. There was a summer breeze blowing fair from the land. At a quarter before five a gun from the Britannia gave the signal to weigh. The air was obscured by the busy smoke of the engines, and it was hard to see how and whence due order would come; but presently the Agamemnon moved through, and with signals at al.. | Orlando Figes | ||
| e92cb3c | Political indoctrination was geared towards producing activists. The propaganda image of the ideal child was a precocious political orator mouthing agitprop. Communism could not be taught from books, educational thinkers maintained. It had to be instilled through the whole life of the school, which was in turn to be connected to the broader world of politics through extra-curricular activities, such as celebrating Soviet holidays, joining p.. | communism indoctrination propaganda soviet-union | Orlando Figes | |
| 34c7150 | Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855) | Orlando Figes | ||
| fc72a2a | When he reached the last hole he saw, far to the west, a series of rockets bloom in the sky. He watched their green and yellow and red petals arch across the horizon, and fade into the gloom of the earth. It was very beautiful, but he recognized them for Chinese rockets. | warfare | Pat Frank | |
| 23c3cdb | His ears were attuned for the steady firing of Couzens' heavy machine guns, which he knew should now commence, and the thud of his carefully sited mortars, but he did not hear them and he realized, suddenly and sickeningly, that the Chinese had not attacked across the spit of land. They were pouring across the ice, and had taken Dog Company in the rear. | warfare | Pat Frank | |
| 4010c65 | Pat, if there's anything you recall about your first visit with Monsignor Frank Kief, I sincerely hope it's this: there is no such thing as being too busy to read. The fine irony is, the answers to the questions we're so busy wrestling with, they're pressed between the pages. Waiting. One need only pause. You'll find books reinforce what you already know, and confirm what you've always suspected. What I mean is our instincts our right, most.. | Kerry Casey | ||
| c31bd1f | Jane felt limp and sated and thoroughly wicked as she snuggled against Dom. They were still joined below, though he'd begun to soften inside her. Still, how naughty it was to be here like this, how deliciously carnal to have made love while they were both half-dressed. Why, Dom still even wore his cravat! She didn't know why that excited her, though it did. But not as much as Dom saying "please" over and over. Letting her take control of th.. | Sabrina Jeffries | ||
| 4284278 | Whatever it is out there, is better equipped than you are. It can see better and hear better and smell better. All you're got on it is brains. Your only chance of getting it is | Pat Frank |