Kundera on youth, politics, stupidity, cruelty, and history

"Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily aroused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality."

—Milan Kundera, The Joke, definitive edition (NY: Harper Perennial/Aaron Asher Books, 1993) 87