Her ability to appraise historical and global figures as if she had recently been personally oppressed or insulted by them was a great assistance in … - Rebecca West

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

"Nikolai growled, "The French lost Strasbourg, they lost Alsace, they lost Lorraine, which they pretended was sacred to them because of their saint, though they are deeply infidel. A republican people deserves to lose all, must lose all."
"But," objected Laura, "when France lost Strasbourg and Alsace-Lorraine, France wasn't a republican, it was ruled by the Emperor."
"No matter," said Nikolai, "the French were a people who once had it in them to make France a republican country, and had it in them to make it one again.

So, where does all that stuff come from? It comes from three main sources: stuff is bought and kept out of fear; stuff is collected and kept out of love. And stuff is kept and multiplied out of habit

(Happy Starts at Home: Getting the Life You Want by Changing the Space You've Got, Rebecca West)