“Savor kindness because cruelty is always possible later.”
“The history of the Romanovs is an Elizabethan tragedy that lasts for three centuries. Its keynote is cruelty, a barbaric, pointless kind of cruelty that has always been common in the East, but that came to Europe only recently, in the time of Hitler.”
Source: Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs (1964), p. 61-62
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Colin Wilson 192
author 1931–2013Related quotes
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, p. 270.
Context: To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Introduction
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)
Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1935/oct/24/international-situation in the House of Commons (24 October 1935)
The 1930s
pg. 49
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Danes
The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage (ed. Eric Bentley) (1968).
Source: Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes (1824), Chapter 11, pp. 149–150