"Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people."
Garrison Keillor
“Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery. The mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty, which it regards pleasure; the man and the citizen are swallowed up in the tyrant; and the return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible."
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead