A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.
ADAM HOCHSCHILDI think in many ways, the Spanish Civil War was the first battle of World War II.
More Adam Hochschild Quotes
-
-
Its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
In Canada, the U.S. and most of Europe it may be easy to take political stands, this is something for which you can be forced to pay with your life, or your freedom, in many other parts of the world, from Iran to Russia to Pakistan to China.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
The late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country’s injustices and contradictions down on paper.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
I think [George] Orwell is right. There are certainly moments when political differences appear minor, and someone can claim to be non-political or to want to stay out of the fray, but today is not one of those moments.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
In his fierce, bold determination to see the lives of modern-day slaves up close, Benjamin Skinner reminds me of the British abolitionist of two hundred years ago
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
In the form of man-made global warming; one can’t be neutral at such a moment. It’s like claiming to be neutral if you’re living in Germany in 1933.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
No international court can ever substitute for a working national justice system. Or for a society at piece.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
You’ve got politicians in power or vying for power who are taking tactics and elements of their appeal from the playbook of fascism.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
No one has better summed up the American appetite for spectacle, the link between sports and politics, and the absolute madness of George W. Bush’s Iraq War.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
After all, where else in the world at this point did you have Americans in uniform who were being bombed by Nazi planes four years before the U.S. entered World War II?
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD -
Leopold’s Congo is but one of those silences of history.
ADAM HOCHSCHILD






