Everything that God sends us is beautiful, even though we may not understand it - and we only need to give it some proper thought to see that what God gives is just sheer happiness; the suffering is what we add to it.

I swore that I would not suffer from the world's grief and the world's stupidity and cruelty and injustice and I made my heart as hard in endurance as the nether millstone and my mind as a polished surface of steel. I no longer suffered, but enjoyment had passed away from me.

The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.

Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.

The town was more than ready to accept the window dressing that hid the ugly truth of Joe's guilt. Some shared the secrets and kept the silence. Others would not have believed if they had been told. They would not have wanted to know. As those who saw and ignored the smoke from the crematoria of Hitler's Germany, they did not want to know that their world was not as it seemed.

A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?