Quotes about Terror

[footnote read J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999, 58.]

Consider the horrors that Americans perpetrated as recently as 1968, in My Lai:

Early in the morning the soldiers were landed in the village by helicopter.  Many were firing as they spread out, killing both people and animals.  There was no sign of the Vietcong battalion and no shot was fired on Charlie Company all day, but they carried on.  They burnt down every house.  They raped woman and girls and then killed them.  They stabbed some women in the vagina and disemboweled others, or cut off their hands or scalps.  Pregnant woman had there stomachs slashed open and were left to die.  There were gang rapes and killings by shooting or with bayonets.  There were mass executions.  Dozens of people at a time, including old men, women and children, were machined-gunned in a ditch.  In four hours nearly 500 villagers were killed.

It is only in folk tales, children's stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.

Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror, no feeling is final.

He who does not at some time, with definite determination consent to the terribleness of life, or even exalt in it, never takes possession of the inexpressible fullness of the power of our existence.

"There is no terror in a bang; only in the anticipation of it."

Ecstatic states of joyous bliss are as adrenaline-fueled as the darkest scream of terror

No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.