In a world without air all you breathe is adventure!
Helen DunmoreRead
It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the extreme lengths to which tyrants go to erase their opposition and deny their existence.
Helen Dunmore's quote sheds light on the destructive mindset of tyrants in the twentieth century, emphasizing that their goal extends beyond mere physical elimination of opponents. Instead, they seek to obliterate the very memory and existence of those who oppose them, highlighting not only the brutality of their actions but also the deep psychological impact of totalitarian regimes that strive to reshape reality itself by denying others' identities.
Themes
TyrannyOppressionMemoryExistenceViolence
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on authoritarian regimes, this quote could highlight how historical tyrants sought to erase their opposition.
More from Helen Dunmore
All quotes →Similar quotes
If church prelates, past or present, had even an inkling of physiology they'd realize that what they term this inner ugliness creates and nourishes the hearing ear, the seeing eye, the active mind, and energetic body of man and woman, in the same way that dirt and dung at the roots give the plant its delicate leaves and the full-blown rose.
Sean O'CaseyRead
There's no doubt that the Christian right has gone to bed with the more conservative elements of the Republican Party. And there's been a melding in their goals when it comes to the separation of church and state. I've always believed in the separation of church and state.
Jimmy CarterRead
In our rather stupid time, hunting is belittled and misunderstood, many refusing to see it for the vital vacation from the human condition that it is, or to acknowledge that the hunter does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, he kills in order to have hunted.
Jose Ortega Y GassetRead
Every great thinker is someone else's moron.
Umberto EcoRead
Utopias have their value -- nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities -- but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.
Isaiah BerlinRead
Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things. For if a man says that the lines which are drawn from the centre of the circle to the circumference are not equal, he understands by the circle, at all events for the time, something else than mathematicians understand by it.
Baruch SpinozaRead