The Greek philosopher Epictetus recognised this two thousand years ago when he wrote: ‘What disturbs and alarms man are not the things but his opinions and fancies about the things.
If I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted. Under such a domination, life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living. But war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear, before we embark on it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake, and that the call to risk everything in their defence, when all the consequences are weighed, is irresistible.
Against the alchemy of two naked bodies in a bed in the darkness, and against all the complex longings and attachments and commitments such intimacy might arouse, he had nothing with which to fight.
My four golden principles are more important now than ever: take it one step at a time; approach the matter dispassionately; avoid a rush to judgement; confide in nobody until there is hard evidence.
How odd it is, thought March afterwards, to live your life in ignorance of the past, of your world, yourself. Yet how easy to do it! You went along from day to day, down paths other people had prepared for you, never raising your head – enfolded in their logic, from swaddling clothes to shroud. It was a kind of fear. Well, goodbye to that. And good to leave it behind – whatever happened now. – 214.
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? Cicero, Orator, 46 BC.
This is the trouble with internet research, in my experience. The proportion of what’s useful to what’s dross dwindles very quickly, and suddenly it’s like searching for something dropped down the back of a sofa and coming up with handfuls of old coins, buttons, fluff, and sucked sweets. What’s important is to ask the right question, and.
That so many people can derive so much pleasure from such a revolting spectacle,” he said to me when he returned home that night, “almost makes one doubt the very premise on which democracy is based.” But he was pleased nevertheless that the masses now thought of him as a good sport, as well as “the Scholar” and “the Greek.
And when did the catastrophe occur?’ ‘Three years later, in two thousand and twenty-five.’ ‘In what.
I feel as if I have walked into a mirrored room and glimpsed myself from an unfamiliar angle for the first time. Is that really what I look like? Is that who I am?
Suddenly his face twisted into a sneer. ‘Oh, I can see what you’re thinking, Hartmann. “What a vulgar fellow! A car salesman! And now he fancies himself as a second Bismarck!” But we have done something your kind never managed. We have made Germany great again.’ ‘Actually,’ said Hartmann mildly, ‘I was thinking you have egg on your chin.
The line between accident and suicide isn’t always clearly defined. You could kill yourself without really making up your mind.
History has always fascinated me. As Cicero himself once wrote: ‘To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’ I quickly forgot the cold and could have spent all day happily unwinding that roll, poring over the events of more than sixty years before.
Really, take it from me: it is always the unknown that is most frightening.
It was like having a child forever at your heels – a persistent, intelligent, embarrassing, deceitful, dangerous child.
So I have a choice: either I am an investigator in that uniform, and try to do a little good; or I am something else without that uniform, and do no good at all.
March had a routine for reading the paper. He started at the back, with the truth. If Leipzig was said to have beaten Cologne four-nil at football, the chances were it was true: even the Party had yet to devise a means of rewriting the sports results. The sports news was a different matter. COUNTDOWN.
It had been a futile gesture, of course, but then they were trapped in an era when futile gestures were all that were available.
Politics is a country idiot capable of concentrating on only one thing at a time.
It was not quite seven and Berlin was alive with possibilities the day had yet to dull.
You can always spot a fool, for he is the man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election. But an election is a living thing – you might almost say, the most vigorously alive thing there is – with thousands upon thousands of brains and limbs and eyes and thoughts and desires, and it will wriggle and turn and run off in directions no one ever predicted, sometimes just for the joy of proving the wiseacres wrong.