Alberto Manguel on greed.
When General Juan Peron, during his first stint as Argentina's
dictator, decided to take his revenge on the writer Jorge Luis
Borges who had refused to take an oath of allegiance to the
General, he removed Borges from his position in a small
municipal library and appointed him poultry inspector at a
local market. Borges resigned and, at a dinner given to him
by some friends, he pronounced these words: "Dictatorships
foster oppression, dictatorships foster servility, dictatorships
foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster
stupidity . . . To fight against these sad monotonies is one of
the writer's many duties."
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