“Soon after my arrival in Moscow I had an hour's conversation with Lenin in English, which he speaks fairly well… I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance. He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of the other. He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim. He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, extraordinarily devoid of self-seeking, an embodied theory. The materialist conception of history, one feels, is his life-blood. He resembles a professor in his desire to have the theory understood and in his fury with those who misunderstand or disagree, as also in his love of expounding, I got the impression that he despises a great many people and is an intellectual aristocrat.
…When I suggested that whatever is possible in England can be achieved without bloodshed, he waved aside the suggestion as fantastic… He described the division between rich and poor peasants, and the Government propaganda among the latter against the former, leading to acts of violence which he seemed to find amusing.”

Part I, Ch. 3: Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky
1920s, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920)

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Bertrand Russell562

logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi… 1872–1970

Chaim Potok book The Chosen

Reb Saunders to Reuven Malter when talking about when Daniel was younger (p. 286)
The Chosen (1967)

“I liked Charentz straight off, but more important than this was the feeling that I had that he was a truly great man. Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met. Charentz seemed great to me, I think, because he was made of a mixture of proud virtues and amusing flaws. On the one hand, his independence of spirit was balanced by a humorous worldliness, his acute intelligence by a curiosity that frequently made him seem naive, his profoundly gentle manners by a kind of mocking mischievousness which might easily be mistaken for rudeness. But he was never rude, he was witty, and the purpose of his wit was to keep himself from the terrible condition of pomposity.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

On Armenian poet Yegishe Charentz, whom Saroyan met in Moscow in June, 1935.
I Used to Believe I Had Forever — Now I'm Not So Sure (1968)

“I always had the feeling that Ohlendorf was spiritually depressed. I mentioned several times to my wife, when we had Ohlendorf to dinner, that he seemed like a man who just could not be happy. Ohlendorf must have been very depressed on account of that experience. He could not laugh heartily - and a man who cannot is either depressed, or sick, or bad. I thought he had something in his soul which bothered him.”

Otto Ohlendorf (1907–1951) German general

Walther Funk to Leon Goldensohn, April 7, 1946.

“Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture — a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Tell-Tale Heart

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

“One afternoon I went to visit him. [Jacob, an older and close friend of Jopie - a real freebooter]. I knew he was home, I took pen, ink and my sketchbook with me and did half a liter of gin in my pocket. He lived in the back of an alley and was sitting in his chair by the window.... I told him, 'You will get the whole bottle, but one condition. I want to make a beautiful drawing of you, so first you have to sit still for twenty minutes and look at me closely. If I look at you and you don't look at me, the deal is over....'Okay', he said. I never had a model like him before... Stock-still he sat.... and looked at me without a single blink of his eyes. Within half an hour he was there on the paper - razor-sharp... While I am writing this down, it is as if he is sitting in front of me again..”

Jopie Huisman (1922–2000) Dutch painter

translation, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in original Dutch / citaat van Jopie Huisman, in het Nederlands: Op een middag ging ik bij hem op bezoek. [bij Jacob, een oudere en hechte vriend van Jopie en een echte vrijbuiter]. Ik wist dat hij thuis was, nam pen en inkt en mijn schetsboek mee en deed een halve liter jenever in mijn zak. Hij woonde achter in een steegje en zat in zijn stoel bij het raam.. .Ik zei: 'Je krijgt de hele fles van me, onder één voorwaarde. Ik wil een prachtige tekening van je maken en daarvoor moet je eerst twintig minuten doodstil zitten en me strak aankijken. Als ik naar jou kijk en jij kijkt niet naar mij, dan gaat het over.. ..'Afgesproken', zei hij. Ik heb nog nooit zo’n model gehad!.. .Doodstil zat hij.. ..en keek me zonder ook maar één keer met zijn ogen te knipperen strak in mijn gezicht. Binnen een half uur stond hij haarscherp op het papier.. .Terwijl ik dit opschreef was het net alsof hij weer voor me zat.
Source: Jopie de Verteller' (2010) - postumous, p. 58

“Friend John, forgive me if I pain. I showed not my feeling to others when it would wound, but only to you, my old friend, whom I can trust. If you could have looked into my very heart then when I want to laugh; if you could have done so when the laugh arrived; if you could do so now, when King Laugh have pack up his crown, and all that is to him — for he go far, far away from me, and for a long, long time — maybe you would perhaps pity me the most of all.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

I was touched by the tenderness of his tone, and asked why.
“Because I know!”
Professor Van Helsing to Dr. John Seward, in Dr. Seward's Diary entry for 22 September
Dracula (1897)

“And so my child and I came to this place
To meet him eye to eye and face to face.
He made my daughter laugh, then we embraced.
We never knew what friends we had
Until we came to Leningrad.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Leningrad.
Song lyrics, Storm Front (1989)

“When [Capt. Pascal] saw me he appeared a good deal surprised, and asked me how I came back? I answered, 'In a ship.' To which he replied dryly, 'I suppose you did not walk back to London on the water.' As I saw, by his manner, that he did not seem to be sorry for his behaviour to me, and that I had not much reason to expect any favour from him, I told him that he had used me very ill, after I had been such a faithful servant to him for so many years; on which, without saying any more, he turned about and went away.”

Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) African abolitionist

Chap. IX
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)

“[Describes visiting a factory farm shed where she saw a large male boar, ] his huge head hanging low towards the barren floor. As I came level with him he raised his head and dragged himself slowly towards me on lame legs. With deliberation he looked straight at me, staring directly into my eyes. It seemed to me that I saw in those sad, intelligent, penetrating eyes a plea, a question to which I had no answer: "Why are you doing this to me?"”

Juliet Gellatley British activist

The Silent Ark, cited in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), ch. 1, p. 23 https://books.google.it/books?id=RbxeFLpNnxUC&pg=PA23.

“I’ll stare the bastard in the face as he screams to God, and I’ll laugh harder when he whimpers like a baby. And when his eyes go dead, the hell I send him to will seem like heaven after what I’ve done to him.”

Frank Miller book The Hard Goodbye

Source: The Hard Goodbye

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