Here's my favorite quote from Josef Stalin. It's a very succinct and scary
representation of his personality.
"One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a
statistic."
It's a true statement of our inability to understand the power and scope of
people like Stalin. You can hear about him killing 300,000 in the Great Purge,
or 10 million who starved in the Ukraine, but your mind can't grasp it. This
goes along quite well with my favorite quote of Eddie Izzard.
"You kill somebody, that's murder, you go to
prison. You kill ten people, you go to Texas they hit you with a brick, that's
what they do. Twenty people you go to a hospital, they look through a small
window at you forever. Over that, we can't deal with it. Somebody's killed a
hundred thousand people, we're almost going...'Well done.'"