“there is no collective guilt,...guilt is individual, like salvation." [p.28]”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“To understand everything is to forgive everything.”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“People had Jewish friends, good friends; Jewish employers, good employers; Jewish employees, hard workers. They obeyed the laws, they didn’t hurt anyone. And here was Hitler saying they were to blame for everything. ‘So when the vans came and took them away, people didn’t do anything. They stayed out of the way, they kept quiet. They even got to believing the voice that shouted the loudest. Because that’s the way people are, particularly the Germans. We’re a very obedient people. It’s our greatest strength and our greatest weakness. It enables us to build an economic miracle while the British are on strike, and it enables us to follow a man like Hitler into a great big mass grave.”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive.”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“the SS had made the two initials of its name, and the twin-lightning symbol of its standard, synonymous with inhumanity in a way that no other organisation before or since has been able to do.”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget.”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“There are some men whose crimes surpass comprehension and therefore forgiveness, and here is the real failure. For they are still among us,”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“I understand so far,’ said Miller. ‘But why a passport? Why not a driving licence, or an ID card?’ ‘Because shortly after the founding of the republic the German authorities realised there must be hundreds or thousands wandering about under false names. There was a need for one document that was so well researched that it could act as the yardstick for all the others. They hit on the passport. Before you get a passport in Germany, you have to produce the birth certificate, several references and a host of other documentation. These are thoroughly checked before the passport is issued. ‘By contrast, once you have a passport, you can get anything else on the strength of it. Such is bureaucracy. The production of the passport convinces the civil servant that, since previous bureaucrats must have checked out the passport holder thoroughly, no further checking is necessary. With a new passport, Roschmann could quickly build up the rest of the identity – driving licence, bank accounts, credit cards. The passport is the open sesame to every other piece of necessary documentation in present-day Germany.”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“It is always tempting to wonder what would have happened if … or if not. Usually it is a futile exercise, for what might have been is the greatest of all the mysteries.”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“I have spent twenty years trying to understand the look in her eyes. Was it love or hatred, contempt or pity, bewilderment or understanding? I shall never know.”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“there was no such thing as collective guilt. But we Germans have been told for twenty years that we are all guilty. Do you believe that?”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“The specific murderers of the SS therefore hide even today behind the collective guilt theory.”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“But the words did not come. They never do, when one needs them.”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
“To understand everything is to forgive everything.’ When one can understand the people, their gullibility and their fear, their greed and their lust for power, their ignorance and their docility to the man who shouts the loudest, one can forgive. Yes, one can forgive even what they did. But one can never forget. There”
― Frederick Forsyth, quote from The Odessa File
Frederick Forsyth
Born place: in Ashford, Kent, England, The United Kingdom
Born date August 25, 1938
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“Do you want to fuck off, or do you need a written invitation?”
― Ais, quote from Fade
“The act of lust and the act of love are the same; it cannot be falsified like a sentiment.”
― Graham Greene, quote from Our Man in Havana
“Evans: We don't know what extraterrestrial civilization is like, but we know humanity.”
― Liu Cixin, quote from The Three-Body Problem
“We’re simply trying to survive—and the first principle of survival is not to worry about the impossible and concentrate on what’s possible.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, quote from Have Space Suit—Will Travel
“Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral reality; they engendered a rejection of reality which as a rule led the cultivated man rapidly to despair. But the varieties of the man-animal are innumerable, and I saw and have described men of refined culture, especially if young, throw all this overboard, simplify and barbarize themselves, and survive. A simple man, accustomed not to ask questions of himself, was beyond the reach of the useless torment of asking himself why.
The harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate: terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever… Certainly, the greatest responsibility lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state; the concurrent guilt on the part of individual big and small collaborators is always difficult to evaluate… they are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt… the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero”
― Primo Levi, quote from The Drowned and the Saved
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