"Well, of course we are westerners," he says in another voice,sounding suddenly professional. "Westerners, or at least immigrants who settled here. For us killing is a question of law and morality, or medicine, at any rate a sanctioned or prohibited act that is very precisely delineated within our system of thought. We kill, but in a more complicated way; we kill according to the dictates and authorization of the law... Our history, right up to the present, is filled with mass murder, but whenever we speak of killing, it is with eyes lowered and tones of pious horror; we cannot do otherwise, it is our prescribed role.
S. Marai, Embers (1942), tr. C.B. Janeworthy (2001), 198
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