#vic

I feel that I, and the people under my command, tried to use all the traditional methods of recruiting agents which were also used by other intelligence services; adopting also means like pressure, money, sex - but that did not characterize my service. ↗

— Markus Wolf

#agents #also #characterize #command #did

Most of the results of using technical bugging devices were of little importance for my service. It may have been different in counter-intelligence, where bugs in flats, etc., were used to obtain a lot of information about what counter-intelligence was interested in. ↗

— Markus Wolf

#been #bugging #bugs #counter-intelligence #devices

It was Carrot who'd suggested to the Patrician that hardened criminals should be given the chance to 'serve the community' by redecorating the homes of the elderly, lending a new terror to old age and, given Ankh-Morpork's crime rate, leading to at least one old lady having her front room wallpapered so many times in six months that now she could only get in sideways. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#crime #age

Darkness does not age; nothing is always nothing ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#always #darkness #dejan-stojanovic #literature #literature-quotes

When we attempt to clear up the mess others have made, or when we love the unlovely, we demonstrate the kind of weirdness God likes. We give the lie to the evolutionary survival of the fittest maxim... ↗

— Ann Benton

#religious #service #value-of-life #age

The merciful precepts of Christ will at last suffuse the Code and it will glow with their radiance. Crime will be considered an illness with its own doctors to replace your judges and its hospitals to replace your prisons. Liberty shall be equated with health. Ointments and oil shall be applied to limbs that were once shackled and branded. Infirmities that once were scourged with anger shall now be bathed with love. The cross in place of the gallows: sublime and yet so simple. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#crime #cross #gallows #hospitals #illness

Why on earth do you carry a mirror around with you?” “It's purely a defensive device. We seldom quarrel, and this is one of the reasons. Can you imagine yourself getting all worked up and contorted and illogical and then coming face to face with yourself, looking at yourself exactly as you look to everyone else? ↗

— Theodore Sturgeon

#anger #anger-management #defence #defensive-device #mirror

I never presume to give advice on writing. I think the best way to learn to write is to read books and stories by bood writers. It's a hard thing to preach about. As Thelonious Monk once said about his field, "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture. ↗

— Maureen Dowd

#architecture

The discovery that detonated Cleveland is one of Britain’s great contributions to awareness of child abuse. In 1986 and 1987 the Leeds paediatricians Dr Jane Wynne and Dr Christopher Hobbs reported in the Lancetthat they were seeing more children who were being buggered than battered. About 300 cases were corroborated. The children were young – two-thirds were pre-school children – and anal abuse was more common than vaginal penetration. They also noted that ‘boys and girls seem to be at similar risk’. Almost half of the children who suffered anal abuse also showed a sign written up in the forensic textbooks as ‘anal dilation’, an anus opening when it was supposed to stay shut; opening and expecting entry. What the paediatricians were observing was not an acute sign, the effect of a single intrusion – a spasm or seizure – but a sign that was telling a story about everyday life; the anatomy of adaption. Anal dilation seemed to describe the architecture of abuse: it allowed the body to receive an incoming object, regularly. ↗

— Beatrix Campbell

#abusers #britain #child-abuse #cleveland #coercion

Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library. ↗

— Austin Kleon

#creativity #inspiration #writing #writing-advice-process #art