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"History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination."
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"Dr. Rex Curry, the professor and attorney from Florida, has debated and largely proven the unavoidable evidence that Hitler's National Socialism was significantly influenced by Bellamy's 'nationalistic' form of 'socialism.' Curry is famous for making the claim that Hitler adopted the 'stiff-arm salute' from Francis and Edward Bellamy."

"Nationalism leads to all sorts of nasty things (even Nazi things) like fascism and war."

"I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go, too! I want to go, too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going."

"They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: 'If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.' Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff."

"Mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another."

"According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future."

"When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of 'greatness.' 'Greatness,' it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the 'great' man nothing is wrong, there is no atrocity for which a 'great' man can be blamed."

"Humans are intelligent and resourceful. If we've been around a million or more years, why are we so disinclined to believe that we could have built cities 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 or even more years ago?"
Explore more quotes by Jodi Picoult

"We take the elevator to the third floor, to the office of Dr. Harrison Chance. His name alone has put me off. Why not Dr. Victor?"

"All any of us wanted, really, was to know that we counted. That someone else's life would not have been as rich without us here."

"It was possible that a miracle was not something that happened to you, but rather something that didn't."

"Doing the right thing for someone else occasionally means doing something that feels wrong to you."

"What I think is that there is no perspective in grief, or in love. How can there be, when one person becomes the center of the universe - either because he has been lost or because he has been found?"

"What is a parent, really, but somebody who picks up the things a child leaves behind - a trail made of stripped off clothing, orphaned shoes, tiny bright plastic game pieces, and nostalgia - and who hands back each of these when its needed?"
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