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The psychology of brutality was worse than the beatings.

Consider the bloody history of Europe: there was a great aspiration for high culture, yet this very same culture was shaped by brutality and barbarism.

Ideas are the great warriors of the world, and a war that has no idea behind it, is simply a brutality.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

In the course of my lifetime, that world went from violence to a kind of peace.

Most people don't like to talk about violent historical death.

We've always lived in dark times. There has always been a range of human experience from the sublime to the brutal, and stories reflect it. It's no less brutal now; each age has its horrors.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.