"Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for."
"It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power."
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Source: Seamus Heaney (2014). “Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996”, p.422, Macmillan
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