Prisoners

"Our shades shall tread Vienna's streets, roaming the courtyard, striking fear in noble hearts."

"The fact that Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia emerged as one of the victor states of the war seemed implicitly to vindicate the act of the man who pulled the trigger on 28 June – certainly that was the view of the Yugoslav authorities, who marked the spot where he did so with bronze footprints and a plaque celebrating the assassin’s ‘first steps into Yugoslav freedom’. In an era when the national idea was still full of promise, there was an intuitive sympathy with South Slav nationalism and little affection for the ponderous multinational commonwealth of the Hapsburg Empire. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s have reminded us of the lethality of Balkan nationalism. Since Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo, It has become harder to think of Serbia as the mere object or victim of great power politics and easier to conceive of Serbian nationalism as an historical force in its own right. From the perspective of today’s European Union we are inclined to look more sympathetically – or at least less contemptuously – than we used to on the vanished imperial patchwork of Austria-Hungary."

"There is no need to carry me to another prison. My life is already ebbing away. I suggest that you nail me to a cross and burn me alive. My flaming body will be a torch to light my people on their path to freedom."

"On June 28, 1914 a tubercular nineteen-year-old Bosnian youth named Gavrilo Princip carried out one of the most successful terrorist acts in all history. The shots he fired that day not only severed fatally the jugular vein of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the Habsburg heir to the thrones of Austria and Hungary. They also precipitated a war that destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and transformed Bosnia-Herzegovina from one of its colonies into a part of a new South Slav state. These were in fact more or less precisely the things Princip had hoped to achieve, even if he cannot have anticipated such far-reaching success. Yet these were only the intended consequences of his action. The war he triggered was not confined to the Balkans; it also drew broad and hideous scars across northern Europe and the Near East. Like gargantuan abattoirs, its battlefields sucked in and slaughtered young men from all the extremities of the globe, claiming in all nearly ten million lives."

"Governor Blagojevich has been arrested in the middle of what we can only describe as a political corruption crime spree. We acted to stop that crime spree."

"Nobody could work a room like Rod—nobody."

"I'll do anything, legal and ethical and honest."

"Unless I get something real good for [Senate Candidate 1], shit, I'll just fuck myself, you know what I'm saying."

"I'm going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain. You hear what I’m saying. And if I don’t get what I want and I'm not satisfied with it, then I'll just take the Senate seat myself."

"A fucking valuable thing; you just don't give it away for nothing."

"I've got this thing and it's fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I'm just not giving it up for fuckin' nothing. I'm not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there."

"By the way, I should say, if anyone wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead, feel free to do it. I appreciate anybody who wants to tape me openly."

"I killed nobody that didn't deserve killing. In all of these here killings there was no alternative. You couldn't call them cold-blooded killings.... It was either my life or theirs."

"Turkey serves as an anchor of democracy, freedom, and stability in a region in turmoil. Your own Thomas Paine once wrote, 'Those who, expect to reap the blessings of freedom must . . . undergo the fatigue of supporting it.' Let me say that in Turkey, we do not feel fatigued by our support of the Western allies because we know that by supporting the allies, we may all continue to reap the blessings of freedom."

"I sometimes feel jealous of countries like the U.S. and Great Britain that have two neighbors. … When you have two neighbors, you have two problems. When you have eight neighbors, you have eight problems."

"Many axes are being kept under cover, waiting in ambush, ready to pounce, when we resign. Have no worries. We will deliver this homeland to you perfectly clean, as it was in Atatürk's time."

"All my trust in the politicians had been rubbed away."

"All freedoms provided by democracy are for those who believe in it. Can the rights and freedoms of millions of virtuous people who believe in democracy be safeguarded if those who seek to destroy it abuse rights and freedoms to achieve their goals?"

"I can say with confidence that we will be able to destroy the major part of an invading force."

"It is not possible to foretell the reaction of certain elements in the Army and Navy."

"The certain way to victory...lies in making everything on Imperial soil contribute to the war effort...combining the total material and spiritual strength of the nation..."

"It is all very well to be cautious, but if we are too cautious we will miss our opportunity."

"With luck we will be able to repulse the invaders before they land. At any rate, I can say that we will be able to destroy the major part of an invading force. That is, we will be able to inflict extremely heavy damage on the enemy."

"The war has now moved from China to South Eastern Asia, and is about to enter the stage of the war for all Asia."

"...the three Powers, discarding the ideologies of individualism and democracy, have adopted the principle of dealing with human society from the totalitarian point of view."

"The greatest reason for Japan's participation in the Triple Alliance lies in the fact that the three signatory powers, at this time of great change in the world situation, have the same position, the same interest, and entertain the same political views. China is not Japan's real enemy in the present incident. In reality Japan is fighting Britain and America. The first thing we are now required to do is to carry out our southward advance."

"We are not imitating Hitler and Mussolini. They are imitating us. They have just discovered what we knew for centuries: that a corporate, collectivist system pays."

"The most serious menace to Japan comes from the Soviet Union. Numerous European countries will eventually embrace Communism. So will China and India if we just watch them with folded arms."

"Japan's true aim was to drive the white man out of Asia."

"The west has always shown a sympathetic, although patronizing, appreciation of the old Japan. Many a foreign observer would remark with a sigh: 'What a pity that things of the past, of beauty and joy forever, should be so mercilessly sacrificed on the altar of modernism!'"

"Fire on anything that moves on the river."

"The world is facing a historic turning point because the system of materialistic liberalism has come to a deadlock."

"Germ warfare against the United States would escalate to war against all humanity."

"Follow the road behind the Emperor. We must build the world for Japan's sake, heaven ordered Japan to achieve this great mission."

"We should not miss the present opportunity or we shall be blamed by posterity."

"As the rising sun melts thinly frozen ice, so the Japanese Army is overcoming Chinese troops."

"I will take responsibility for all operations."

"The kind of slaughter and violence that we have seen in this war, was in my experience very rare during the Russo-Japanese war. In modern war, the whole people are mobilized. Hence the majority of the troops correspond to the people as a whole. An army in which scandals and atrocities occur in great numbers, must surely reflect a decline in public morality?"

"We are against dependence on a change in the international situation for the solution of the China Incident."

"I retained no records and I am not a good writer anyhow. So the best approach is for historians like you to extract the facts directly from people like me."

"Asia, in cooperation with Europe, is about to take simultaneous action towards realization of a New World Order."

"When I was a young man, I found out that if you hurt somebody bad enough, they'll leave you alone. When I tried to leave everybody alone and just do my own thing, everybody just wanted to hurt me. Until one day I just decided, well, I've had enough of this picking. And there were like six young men still figuring they were going to mess with my head. And we went to war. To their surprise, I was no longer taking the beating, I was giving it."

"No, no, no. This was the system. Wirth had invented it. It worked. And because it worked, it was irreversible."

"Cargo. They were cargo. I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity-it couldn't have; it was a mass-a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, 'What shall we do with this garbage?' I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo."

"I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass...they were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips."

"My guilt is that I am still here...I should have died. That is my guilt."

"He was a Dragoner (one of the imperial elite regiments). Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him."

"My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty..."

"Zuma jacked up public spending, but for consumption and corruption, not investment. State-owned companies were drained by Zuma and his lackeys, who are suspected of having looted about the equivalent of 20 per cent of GDP. Constant power outages and collapsing infrastructure contributed to growth collapsing and soon becoming negative. After being halved under the predecessors, public debt doubled under Zuma. Extreme poverty had also halved under the previous administration; under Zuma it not only stopped declining but even began to increase. That’s the way it usually goes. Strongmen who complain that growth takes too long to provide results are like the farmer who has no patience with the harvest and quickly makes himself popular by letting everyone gorge on the seed. Fewer seeds means you will have less to eat next season. Sooner or later, you’ll run out of other people’s harvests, as Thatcher would have said."

"To witness the damage a single person can inflict on a country, one can head to South Africa. Following the liberation from apartheid, Nelson Mandela, as president from 1994, created a climate of reconciliation while democratizing the country and liberalizing the economy. Under Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, inflation was tamed, government debt was halved and the growth rate reached 5 per cent. The outside world thought South Africa could be the next economic miracle. But the leader of the ANC’s left wing, Jacob Zuma, agitated against this ‘neoliberal’ model and gained power in 2009–18 on a programme promising that state control of the economy would create fair distribution. He really did change things – for the worse."