Esma Quotes & Sayings

Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel. — Ayn Rand

Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?). Not the little wildflowers. Nothing. — Alice Walker

I know you have the capability to understand right from wrong because you hate people who harm children. Well, why not despise people who harm animals? It's hypocritical! Why protect one and violate the other when neither one wants or deserves the abuse? They just wish it would end. Stop praising the innocence in children then ignoring or making fun of the innocence in animals. — Gary Yourofsky

Nobody could tell us or really had a very good idea, if there were a massive release of radiation, what kind of medical treatment people were going to need and this or that, or, indeed, whether there would be medical personnel around. — William Scranton

By very conservative estimates, Turkish repression of Kurds in the 1990s falls in the category of Kosovo. It peaked in the early 1990s; one index is the flight of more than a million Kurds from the countryside to the unofficial Kurdish capital, Diyarbakir, from 1990 to 1994, as the Turkish army was devastating the countryside. — Noam Chomsky

There are many who do not like ESMA being a museum with tours for members of the public and foreign tourists; they want to knock it down and create a park with a golf course 'so that society can forget'. — Paul Vallely

I'm the first has-been star singer ever to sing with the circus. I mean, Presley sang with the circus, but that was before he became a star. — Tiny Tim

I liked projects where I could take things apart and figure out exactly how they worked. The problem is, you can't do that with people. — Leila Sales

Unfortunately, 'climate' has become a dirty word - obviously in politics, but even to some degree in my world, in venture capital. People hesitate if they see something that's purported to be green. That's not a reason to invest for many people. — Evan Williams

We can live in fear or act out of hope. — Bonnie Raitt

Time, he thought, was a privilege, and in a just world this would be their bed, and this night not worth counting, it being the first of innumerable shared nights to come. But now he knew why men married, for then time was theirs, a privilege and a claim; your time is all mine, he would tell her. — Meredith Duran

It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one. — Lytton Strachey

There were other refugees around him experiencing the same fears and helplessness, but Litvinoff didn't find any comfort in this because there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone. Litvinoff preferred to be alone. — Nicole Krauss

And like everybody else, I like the Rocky movies, but if you look at them again you can see all the misses, but the intensity of it, but that wasn't what this is. — Charles S. Dutton

Now they're really amused, and burst into laughter. Someone tries a variation while still clapping hands: 'Clipped prick ... clipped prick.' Whereupon they begin alternating while clapping their hands: 'Jew ... Clipped prick ... Jew ... Clipped prick.' It seems they're no longer angry, merely having a good time. I keep bouncing in the chair and moaning as the electric shocks penetrate [ ... ] — Jacobo Timerman

I have a talent for complicating situations, I said. — Seanan McGuire

I'm a man of the marketplace as well as an artist. I'm a pawnbroker of myth. — Richard Condon

Many governments employ torture but this was the first time that the element of Saturnalia and pornography in the process had been made so clear to me. If you care to imagine what any inadequate or cruel man might do, given unlimited power over a woman, then anything that you can bring yourself to suspect was what became routine in ESMA, the Navy Mechanics School that became the headquarters of the business. I talked to Dr. Emilio Mignone, a distinguished physician whose daughter Monica had disappeared into the precincts of that hellish place. What do you find to say to a doctor and a humanitarian who has been gutted by the image of a starving rat being introduced to his daughter's genitalia? Like hell itself the school was endorsed and blessed by priests, in case any stray consciences needed to be stilled. — Christopher Hitchens

The entire affective world, constructed over the years with utmost difficulty, collapses with a kick in the father's genitals, a smack on the mother's face, an obscene insult to the sister, or the sexual violation of a daughter. Suddenly an entire culture based on familial love, devotion, the capacity for mutual sacrifice collapses. Nothing is possible in such a universe, and that is precisely what the torturers know ... From my cell, I'd hear the whispered voices of children trying to learn what was happening to their parents, and I'd witness the efforts of daughters to win over a guard, to arouse a feeling of tenderness in him, to incite the hope of some lovely future relationship between them in order to learn what was happening to her mother, to get an orange sent to her, to get permission for her to go to the bathroom. — Jacobo Timerman