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[MNToothpick]

"Between the very general fear of a war for which everyone is preparing and the very specific fear of lethal ideologies, it is therefore quite true that we live in terror.  We live in terror because persuasion is no longer possible because man has been delivered entirely into the hands of history and can no longer turn toward that part of himself which is true as the historic part, and which he discovers when he confronts the beauty of the world and of people's faces.  And because we live in a world of abstraction, a world of bureaucracy and machinery, of absolute ideas and of messianism without subtlety.  We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right, whether it be in their machines or their ideas.  And for all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world."

Albert Camus, Century of Fear, Neither Victims Nor Executioners, Combat.