One was George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, wits its horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state - a book that gave us Big Brother and thoughtcrime and newspeak and the memory hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever.
What increases my pain is this [Islamist] chauvinist arrogance which claims that innocent blood, shed by barbarian, brutal minds under the slogan "Allahu Akbar", means nothing compared to the act of building an Islamic mosque whose mission will be to... spawn new terrorists... Suppose we put ourselves in the place of American citizens.
How can the progress of modern science and medicine and industry promise to liberate people from ignorance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help create a world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology, knowingly practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop lethal weapons of mass destruction?
Norman Podhoretz has a "brutal, little mind".
It's come to represent American racism at its most brutal — never mind that James Byrd Jr. was chained to a truck and dragged to death in Texas in 1998 or that Sean Bell and Oscar Grant III lost their lives in New York in 2006 and California in 2009, respectively.
Keep in mind how brutal the budget pressure is going to be.
I have in mind the brutal attack on a young woman only a few days ago in the capital and other such reprehensible incidents elsewhere.
But the ulcerating guilt captured in that brutal couplet calls to mind something else that Kipling did: pull strings to get John a commission, after John had twice been rejected on account of weak eyesight.
He urged King to expose the worst of voting conditions in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, but he could hardly have had in mind the brutal reaction of Selma's sheriff, Jim Clark.
It was about five years ago, but the book really stuck in my mind: the brutal murder of a young soldier; the sparseness of the prose; the violent, vivid heat.
