It was said that the ancient beast Pekh roamed the forest—a creature, covered in scales, that sired offspring every twelve years and dragged behind him twelve tails oozing poisonous sweat. (Location 490)
Inside each one of us, the noble bastard struggles with the communard. And everything around us helps the bastard, while the communard is all alone— (Location 643)
You know, the old man might sicken. He’d probably even waste away. Although who can tell? That’s the thing—the psychology of these monsters is very much a dark forest. (Location 1046)
Note: ooh contextual evil in history. special type according to environment.
And in the fact that the residents had stopped singing political ditties, had become very serious, and knew exactly what was needed for the good of the state. (Location 1077)
He caused a complete economic collapse, wrote the treatise On the Brutish Nature of the Farmer, and finally, a year ago, organized the “protective guard”—the gray troops. The monopolies had stood behind Hitler. No one was standing behind Don Reba, and it was obvious that the storm troopers would eventually devour him like a fly. But he kept twisting and turning, piling one absurdity on top of another, writhing around as if he was trying to deceive himself, as if he knew nothing but the paranoid task of exterminating any trace of culture. (Location 1289)
Maybe Don Reba is nothing more than a stupid, lucky schemer who doesn’t know what he wants himself, slyly making a fool of himself for all to see. (Location 1298)
any sort of person could come to power. (Location 1302)
For example, take a man who has spent his entire life annoying his neighbors. Spitting into their pots of soup, putting ground glass into their hay. Of course he’ll be removed eventually, but he’ll have plenty of time to spit, to chortle, to make mischief. And it doesn’t matter to him that he won’t make a mark on history, or that distant descendants will rack their brains as they attempt to fit his behavior into an already developed theory of historical progress. (Location 1302)
Rumata shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “The ones who don’t bother anyone get slaughtered first.” (Location 2590)
Except rage is what they don’t have yet. Only fear. Everyone for himself, only God for all. (Location 2598)
Baron Pampa roared like a nuclear ship in the polar fog. (Location 2787)
And it’s all because a slave has a much better understanding of his master, however brutal, than his liberator, for each slave can easily imagine himself in his master’s place, but few can imagine themselves in the place of a selfless liberator. (Location 2894)
And if for us communism is a world of freedom and creativity, for them communism is a society where the people immediately and with pleasure perform all the prescriptions of the party and government. (Location 3402)
The adventure story had to, was obliged to, become a story about the fate of the intelligentsia, submerged in the twilight of the Middle Ages. (Location 3408)
and I. Efremov stood up for us in his brilliant article “Billions of Facets of the Future.” (Location 3426)
