# Quote — Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost

> In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in—its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence—is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.

- Author: [Adam Hochschild](https://www.leafyquotes.com/adam-hochschild.md)
- Book: [King Leopold's Ghost](https://www.leafyquotes.com/adam-hochschild/king-leopolds-ghost.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adam_Hochschild#King_Leopold's_Ghost_(1998)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/adam-hochschild/king-leopolds-ghost/in-the-american

## More from this book

> The movement's other great achievement is this. Among its supporters, it kept alive a tradition, a way of seeing the world, a human capacity for outrage at pain inflicted on another human being, no matter whether that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, at another end of the earth.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/adam-hochschild/king-leopolds-ghost/the-movements-other.md)

> I realized something else about the terror in the Congo and the controversy that came to surround it. It was the first major international atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and the camera. In its mixture of bloodshed on an industrial scale, royalty, sex, the power of celebrity, and rival lobbying media campaigns in half a dozen countries, it seemed strikingly close to our own time. (Introduction, page 4)

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/adam-hochschild/king-leopolds-ghost/i-realized-something.md)

> In the Soviet Union, for example, shooting or jailing political opponents at first helped the Communist Party and then Josef Stalin gain absolute power. But after there were no visible opponents left, seven million more people were executed, and many millions more died in the far-flung camps of the gulag.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/adam-hochschild/king-leopolds-ghost/in-the-soviet.md)