Osip Mandelstam Quotes
I was stopped in the dense Soviet wood by bandits who called themselves my judges.
Mandelstam, Osip. The Collected Critical Prose and Letters. Translated by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link, Ardis, 1979, p. 317.
The editor had discovered that she and her husband had had an affair before they were married and she was still married to another man. This would have ruined her husband’s political career and she decided to prevent that by killing the editor with the information. She was tried for murder and acquitted on the grounds that this was not a rationally premeditated murder but the uncontrollable emotional reaction of a woman who was so weak that she had no control over her actions. This was the excuse that the jury needed, as the personal slandering of politicians for things unrelated to their political activity was becoming very unpopular. This affair was the beginning of the tendency of the French media to not write about the personal and sexual activities of politicians which became a strong cultural tradition.
The Pope was justifying his earlier excommunication of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV who in turn excommunicated Pope Gregory.
The human rights abuses in the Belgian Congo were horrible. Natives who refused to work for the low wages were murdered or had their hands chopped off. The indigenous population was markedly reduced. Word of the atrocities started leaking out to Europe. It is not known whether the King really wanted any reform or just sent the instructions to cover himself. The instructions were not followed; the atrocities continued, and Leopold never took any steps to discipline his agents and minions. The Belgian Congo had the worst atrocities in the world until WWII.
O, you anarchic scum, you cowardly murderers, you leeches upon honest labor, you midnight assassins!
Otis and his paper were virulently anti-labor. See {617172} .
“Factions” was the word for political parties then.
Charles I had caused the death of his subjects with impunity and was called to account. However, the English Parliament did not know what specific crime the King had committed. Kings had executed people, guilty of crimes and otherwise, for centuries. For what could a king be accountable. Cooke developed the crime of Tyranny and drew up and presented the indictment for that. The King was found guilty and executed. This was the first time in legal history that a ruler was called to account for crimes committed against his own people. It became the foundation for many trials thereafter including that of Saddam Hussein in 2006.
Mark Twain referring to and reflecting on his encounter with the Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Aziz.
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian and Soviet poet. He was the husband of Nadezhda Mandelstam and one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife.
