Royce Kurmelovs

"I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted that it was worth knowing." - Hunter S Thompson, The Rum Diary.

Two years ago I started researching another of those mysteries from an earlier era. It began, actually, with work on a separate job. A couple of French academics had published a journal article looking at Total Oil's historical contribution to the global campaign to frustrate climate science and

"A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron," - Joseph Stalin, Georgian Revolution and Soviet dictator, speech, "The Elections in St. Petersburg", 12 January 1913.

“In fact, I hate tree huggers,” - Sir Keir Starmer, former UK Prime Minister, reported in The Telegraph 10 July 2023, quote denied by unnamed Labor sources.

"He was never wrong," attributed to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, speaking of Lee Kuan Yew, first prime minister and dictator of Singapore - 1998.

"They tried to kill me, as you see I am alive, but tell me, were my obituaries good?" - Makarios III, President of Cyprus following a coup and attempt on his life, speech to the UN, 19 July 1974.

"To Joseph Stalin: Stop sending people to kill me! [...] If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send a very fast working one to Moscow and I certainly won't have to send another." - Josep Tito, guerrilla and politician, Message found among the personal effects of Joseph Stalin.

"Sometimes I feel like I’m being paid to curse in front of people who haven’t heard it in a while." - Anthony Bourdain, cook, writer, father, The New York Times, 8 June 2018

'We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal."' - Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Letter from Birmingham Jail 1963

"It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." - Deng Xiaoping, speech at the Communist Youth League conference in July 1962.