"An old historian says about the Roman armies that marched through a country, burning and destroying every living thing, They make a solitude, and they call it peace. And so men do with their consciences. They stifle them, sear them, forcibly silence them, somehow or other; and then, when there is a dead stillness in the heart, broken by no voice of either approbation or blame, but doleful, like the unnatural quiet of a deserted city, then they say, It is peace; and then the man's uncontrolled passions and unbridled desires dwell solitary within the fortress of his own spirit."
Alexander Maclaren
A country that stifles dissent and disclosure, strangling knowledge under a blanket of falsehoods and secrecy, eventually kills its own conscience and reason, thereby making soulless monsters of itself and its people. They can become capable of almost any act, moving first from excess and then to outrage, mindlessly offending against both God and nature.
Without a pang of regret or twinge of conscience, they feel only the heat of their own passions, their lusts and fears, which are driven by the necessity of the emptiness that fuels their insatiable hunger to consume the lives of others. And this is how the madness begins.
