Tragedy Quotes
There's no proof that Stalin ever said this, but if he did, he would likely have been quoting a 1932 essay on French humor by the German journalist, satirist, and pacifist Kurt Tucholsky who wrote in a fiction story: "The war? I cannot find it to be so bad! The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!".
The “old” writing to which he was referring was a quotation from Roman Poet Horace. See {589060}.
{627488} is an earlier quotation by a French Diplomat of very similar sentiment, but it is not known if Stalin had ever seen it. Also See Beilby Porteus {627489} for an 18th century variation. This is a puzzling phenomenon. In the United States if there is a plane crash and a hundred people are killed, it is page one and television lead news. But between 40,000 and 50,000 Americans die each year, one or two at a time in auto crashes, and it does not seem to be news. More American college students commit suicide (about 1200 a year) then are killed in mining or other industrial accidents, but the former we rarely hear about.
Sherman had friends in the South and he saw rebellion and war coming. Most Southerners had a romanticized view of war and were so wrapped up in trying to preserve their economic and cultural way of life that they did not think through the implications of such a war. After and during the war, he was particularly angry with the Southerners who had brought such terrible casualties and destruction upon the land and its people.
