Curiosity Urges You On-driving Force.

A Curious Thing About Atrocity Stories Is That They Mirror, Instead Of The Events They Purport To Describe, The Extent Of The Hatred Of The People That Tell Them. Still, You Can't Listen Unmoved To Tales Of Misery And Murder.

It's Not The Possibility Of Stalinism In The U.s. That's Worrying Me, It's The Fact That The Stalinist C.p. Seems Doomed To Fail And To Bring Down With It All The Humanitarian Tendencies I Personally Believe In--all The While Acting As A Mould On Which Its Obverse The Fascist Mentality Is Made--and This Recent Massacre Is Certainly A Sign Of Stalinism's Weakness Not Of Its Strength. None Of That Has Anything To Do With Marx's Work--but It Certainly Does Influence One's Attitude Towards A Given Political Party.

It Has Been The Struggle Between Privileged Men Who Have Managed To Get Hold Of The Levers Of Power And The People In General Withtheir Vague And Changing Aspirations For Equality, For Justice, For Some Kind Of Gentler Brotherhood And Peace, Which Has Kept That Balance Of Forces We Call Our System Of Government In Equilibrium.

Apathy Is One Of The Characteristic Responses Of Any Living Organism When It Is Subjected To Stimuli Too Intense Or Too Complicated To Cope With. The Cure For Apathy Is Comprehension.

The Only Excuse For A Novelist, Aside From The Entertainment And Vicarious Living His Books Give The People Who Read Them, Is As A Sort Of Second-class Historian Of The Age He Lives In. The "reality" He Missed By Writing About Imaginary People, He Gains By Being Able To Build A Reality More Nearly Out Of His Own Factual Experience Than A Plain Historian Or Biographer Can.