Saturday, January 30, 2021

Pimpernel Smith

 

"Pimpernel Smith" is a 1941 movie, featuring National Socialists appropriately as the bad guys, and Leslie Howard as an english professor who continually outwits them.  I cannot speak to the merits of the movie, but this quote is good, and hopefully prescient.  It is from a scene at the end of the movie, when Professor Smith has been captured by the gestapo:

General von Graum: Mm. We can afford to make a loss, our profits will be tremendous. Tonight we march against Poland, and tomorrow we'll see the dawn of a new order. We shall make a German empire of the world... Why do I talk to you? You are a dead man 

Professor Horatio Smith: May a dead man say a few words to you, general, for your enlightenment? You will never rule the world... because you are doomed. All of you who demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred. And still, you will have to go on... because you will find no horizon... see no dawn... until at last you are lost and destroyed. You are doomed, captain of murderers. And one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words...  

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