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"If you can find a young person, perhaps a student, before his opinions and personality have fully matured, then make him truly believe in your cause, he will serve you for many years."

 Oleg Kalugin, former KGB Colonel  "What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?"

"Political initiative - in the absence of change, the stalemate endures. People who have suffered directly continue on the lonely business of surviving. Others ignore the violence, the disruption and insulate themselves as best they can. While the still vote, politics is largely an irrelevance. There are little lights beginning to flicker - industrial redevelopment in the cities, is starting to make some indent on the country's chronical unemployment figures; power sharing on some local councils, and the growth of the integrated schools movement are practical examples of people at ground level attempting to breach barriers."

"The leader of men in warfare can show himself to his followers only through a mask, a mask that he must make for himself, but a mask made in such form as will mark him to men of his time and place as the leader they want and need."

John Keegan

"I will shake your hand,sir, because of your position. But this hand is stained with the blood of my son." His son Thomas, a lance corporal, was killed in Iraq

Reg Keys

"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of a society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a way which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." 1919

 Maynard Keynes

"I want to eat all the good food in the world, drink all the drinks in the world and make love to all the ladies in the world."

"Hostage is crucifying aloneness. There's a silent screaming slide into the bowels of ultimate despair .. the humiliating stripping away of every sense and fibre of body and mind and spirit that make you what you are."

 Brian Keenan

"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future." (Frankfurt, 25 June 1963)

"We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through the darkness to a safe and sane future."

"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."

Robert F. Kennedy

"How would Lloyd George like it if a Russian were to come to him to tell him how to manage the English people? We are only doing what you have done centuries ago, but we are trying to do it better - without the Napoleon and without the Cromwell. People call me a mad idealist but thank God for the idealists in this world." In conversation with R H Bruce Lockhart in Memoirs of a British Agent.

(when Minister of Justice, 1917) Alexander Kerensky

"High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation."

Jack Kinder

"When you have somebody who for 45 years has been focused on that area [NATO's nuclear deployments] they obviously weren't going to say 'Please may I be redundant?'"

Former Secretary of State for Defence Tom King

"If you don't get it right in thirteen years, you'll never get it right." On Conservative government

 Neil Kinnock

"Trust a snake before a harlot and a harlot before a Pathan."

If:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
 Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
 And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap out of all your winnings
 And risk it one on turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
 And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
 To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
 Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
 And - which is more - you’ll be a Man, my son!

They are too near
To be great
But our children
Shall understand
When and how our
Fate was changed
And by whose hand.

Rudyard Kipling

"The task of the leader is to get his people from where they are to where they have not been."

"The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerilla wins if he does not lose."

Foreign Affairs, Jan 1969
Henry Kissinger

"Train your corporals now to command troops of tanks and platoons of infantry. Train your young officers, warrant officers and Sergeants to command squadrons and companies and train yourselves to command regiments and battalions. Casualties amongst leaders will be terrible and unless the junior ranks are trained and physically prepared to take over, it will be difficult to maintain confidence. Young leaders must be trained in peace to seize the initiative and not wait for orders."

GOC of 4th Canadian Armd Div in Normandy Major-General Kitching

"Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one’s innocence; it prevents acclimatisation and undermines one’s morale."

"We walked on the railway tracks because the roads were full of Americans. We had our Hitler Youth winter uniforms on, since we had no winter clothes. We spent the night on straw in a signal box. The next morning we heard the news that the war was over." reports of 07.05.1945 then aged 16

"Our interest must be that East Germans stay at home." In Poland, 09.11.1989

"Niemand braucht sich vor einem wiedervereinigten Deutschland zu fürchten." (1990) (cf: "Niemand hat die Absicht eine Mauer zu errichten."!)

"Die Deutschen haben jetzt die historische Chance, in freier Selbstbestimmung die Einheit des Vaterlandes zu vollenden .. Die Einheit ist jetzt möglich. Es liegt jetzt an uns Deutschen, ob wir diese Chance beherzt und besonnen ergreifen."

"Die Frage der Oder-Neiße-Grenze ist eine Entscheidung des gesamt-deutschen Parlaments und einer gesamt-deutschen Regierung." (13.02.1990 during unificatin talks).

"America is the world leader. France and Germany will continue to set the pace in European affairs." 07.02.1992

"Never reveal all of yourself to other people; hold back something in reserve so that people are never quite sure if they really know you."

Michael Korda

 "Ich wollte kein kleiner Stalin sein." 6/4/93 to the Kreuzberg PDS group, on why he didn't try to turn back the clock in November '89.

"Mach das Tor auf."

We will bury you. 26.11.1956

Krushchev

 "Das Recht ist eine Gewalt, die der Gewalt das Recht streitig macht."

"A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person."

"In the world of immodesty, where youth and beauty mean nothing, is the world nothing but a vast concentration camp of bodies, one like the next, with souls invisible."

"If love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."

"Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known since childhood."

"Behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and the image of that evil [is] a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison." (referring also to overseas and domestic resistance)

From The Unbearable Lightness of Being

 Milan Kundera