If You Want To Humble An Empire

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Do we now panic, or will we be brave? Once the dump trucks and bulldozers have cleared away the rubble and a thousand funeral Masses have been said, once the streets are swept clean of ash and glass and the stores and monuments and airports reopen, once we have begun to explain this to our children and to ourselves, what will we do? What else but build new cathedrals, and if they are bombed, build some more. Because the faith is in the act of building, not the building itself, and no amount of terror can keep us from scraping the sky.

--Reported by the staff of TIME magazine

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HANS MONDROW, East Germany's last communist prime minister, on the East German soldiers who ignored orders to shoot to kill those crossing into West Germany and made the decision to open the border on Nov. 9, 1989
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Quotes of the Day »

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HANS MONDROW, East Germany's last communist prime minister, on the East German soldiers who ignored orders to shoot to kill those crossing into West Germany and made the decision to open the border on Nov. 9, 1989

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