Second chances are scarier than first chances, because the second time you know how much you’re risking.
Nora Roberts (via quotemadness)
How to Think Like a Spy: The Moscow Rules
In East Berlin during the Cold War and before the Wall came down, Soviet intelligence had eyes and ears everywhere. To survive, Western spies had to follow “Moscow’s rules” –
- Assume Nothing
- Never go against your Gut
- Everyone is Potentially under opposition rule
- Don’t look back, you are never completely alone
- Go with the flow
- Vary your pattern and stay within your profile
- Lull them into a sense of complacency
- Don’t harass the opposition
- Pick the time and place for action
- Keep your options open
–From the International Spy Museum Handbook of Practical Spying
(via meloyhaberman)
Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.
Terry
Pratchett
, I Shall Wear Midnight.
(via cervideaux)
You don’t understand an antagonist until you understand why he’s a protagonist in his own version of the world.
John Rogers (via psych-facts)
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats (via decepticonsuggestion)
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.
In other cases you can’t even tell a true war story. Sometimes it’s just beyond telling.
“How to Tell a True War Story,” Tim O’Brien (via prewars)
Inspiration Haven 