
“The temptations of resentment and hatred are what people have to fight with all the time.”
Other
Source: Homage to Catalonia
“The temptations of resentment and hatred are what people have to fight with all the time.”
Other
Source: His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997), Ch. 15 : Bloodmoss
Context: If you're the bearer of the knife, you have a task that's greater than you can imagine. A child... How could they let it happen? Well, so it must be.... There is a war coming, boy. The greatest war there ever was. Something like it happened before, and this time the right side must win. We've had nothing but lies and propaganda and cruelty and deceit for all the thousands of years of human history. It's time we started again, but properly this time...."
He stopped to take in several rattling breaths.
"The knife," he went on after a minute. "They never knew what they were making, those old philosophers. They invented a device that could split open the very smallest particles of matter, and they used it to steal candy. They had no idea that they'd made the one weapon in all the universes that could defeat the tyrant. The Authority. God. The rebel angels fell because they didn't have anything like the knife; but now..."
"I didn't want it! I don't want it now!" Will cried. "If you want it, you can have it! I hate it, and I hate what it does — "
"Too late. You haven't any choice: you're the bearer. It's picked you out. And, what's more, they know you've got it; and if you don't use it against them, they'll tear it from your hands and use it against the rest of us, forever and ever."
"Nobel peace prize Dmitry Muratov: Propaganda is war itself" https://voxeurop.eu/en/nobel-peace-prize-dmitry-muratov-propaganda-is-war-itself/, Vox Europ, 3 May 2022
Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi
Context: War will come again after this one. It will come again as long as it can be determined by people other than those who fight. The same causes will produce the same effects, and the living will have to give up all hope.
"Gore Vidal" (1977)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)
"Revised Historiography", Liberty Bell magazine (April 1980)
1970s, 1980s
The Devil's Advocate (1952)
1950s
Context: You see, when a nation threatens another nation the people of the latter forget their factionalism, their local antagonisms, their political differences, their suspicions of each other, their religious hostilities, and band together as one unit. Leaders know that, and that is why so many of them whip up wars during periods of national crisis, or when the people become discontented and angry. The leaders stigmatize the enemy with every vice they can think of, every evil and human depravity. They stimulate their people’s natural fear of all other men by channeling it into a defined fear of just certain men, or nations. Attacking another nation, then, acts as a sort of catharsis, temporarily, on men’s fear of their immediate neighbors. This is the explanation of all wars, all racial and religious hatreds, all massacres, and all attempts at genocide.
To Leon Goldensohn, April 6, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
2000s, 2006, United Nations General Assembly speech (September 2006)