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great people are almost always bad people

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2014.06.02

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; great people are almost always bad people. I'd heard the first part of this famous quote by "Baron Acton", but not that last bit. Happily, not a lot of great people about these days.

rand()m quote

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

—Anton Chekhov