Sublime

It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb.

Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo’s patron in Milan, had a reputation for ruthlessness that included, among other alleged acts, poisoning his nephew in order to seize the ducal crown. But Ludovico was a choir boy compared to Leonardo’s next patron, Cesare Borgia. Name any odious activity and Borgia was the master of it: murder, treachery, incest, debaucher

History is made by the participant's errors, biases and misconceptions.

Zweig s’attache à montrer à quel point le philosophe, après avoir consacré sa vie à la recherche d’une vaine gloire, adopte alors un comportement exemplaire et historique, en luttant jusqu’à la mort pour défendre les idéaux républicains.

Árbenz nunca se consideró socialista y tomaba siempre con ironía los empeños de Fortuny de formarse intelectualmente leyendo a pensadores marxistas (libros que nunca encontraba en Guatemala y debía encargar a México, gastándose la plata que a duras penas le alcanzaba para comer) y de constituir en Guatemala, algún día, un partido comunista. Pero, l

Your actions should be determined not by the desire of the people around you, but by the needs of all mankind.

Vladimir Ulyanov,

When Stalin joined the Bolshevik Party, Russia was suffering from a huge problem of elite overproduction, which was a fundamental cause of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.[4] By 1941, when the Soviet Union entered World War II, Stalin had taken care of this problem by ruthlessly exterminating this elite “surplus.” He essentially created a

Leonardo may have gone to work with Borgia at the behest of Machiavelli and Florence’s leaders as a gesture of goodwill, similar to the way he had been dispatched twenty years earlier to Milan as a diplomatic gesture to Ludovico Sforza. Or he may have been sent as a way for Florence to have an agent embedded with Borgia’s forces. Maybe it was both.