The Northman (2022)
1.
Andrew Sullivan: “We find that hates are often very different phenomena one from another, that they have very different psychological dynamics, that they might even be better understood by not seeing them as varieties of the same thing at all. […] There is, for example, the now-unfashionable distinction between reasonable hate and unreasonable hate. In recent years, we have become accustomed to talking about hates as if they were all equally indefensible, as if it could never be the case that some hates might be legitimate, even necessary. But when some eight hundred thousand Tutsis are murdered under the auspices of a Hutu regime in Rwanda, and when a few thousand Hutus are killed in revenge, the hates are not commensurate. […] The hate of the perpetrators is a monstrosity. The hate of the victims, and their survivors, is justified.”
2.
Fred Kaplan: “The world as a whole is still in a state of nature, in which there is no Hobbesian Leviathan to punish the unjust. Indeed, just beneath the veneer of civilization lie the bleakest forces of human passion, and thus the central question for realists is: Who can do what to whom?”
3.
David Brin: “In one Middle Eastern culture, nearly every fairy tale focuses on one theme—that of revenge. In another land mothers are known to sit their little sons on their knees and say, ‘Someday you will deflower virgins and ravish other men’s wives, but if this happens to your wife or sister, cut her throat.’”
4.
“Some endeavours are doomed at their inception, not by cowardice but by their very nature. Franz Reichelt, the Flying Tailor, fatally leapt from the Eiffel Tower in 1912 wearing a baggy parachute suit, certain his invention could save the lives of aviators. For forty seconds he paused before the jump. When at last he tilted forward and stepped into the void, the updraught wrapped the fabric tightly round his body and he fell just as a stone would fall. The facts, the mathematics, were against him. At the foot of the tower he made a shallow grave in the frozen Parisian ground fifteen centimetres deep. […]
“Revenge: the impulse is instinctive, powerful—and forgivable. Insulted, duped, maimed, no one can resist the allure of vengeful brooding. […] But the raised hand, the violent enactment, is cursed. The maths says so. There’ll be no reversion to the status quo ante, no balm, no sweet relief, or none that lasts. Only a second crime.”
- Ian McEwan, Nutshell (2016)
