“It is not that people today are wicked or stupid; they are simply deaf. The thundering of the machine they have set in motion and which carries them toward the precipice is so loud that the far-off cries of those who have been excluded by the machine because they hold no ticket never reach the deafened ears of that joyous assemblage.”

(Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The End of a Post-War Era,” originally in La libertà d’Italia, 6 October 1950; p. 140 in Stories from the City of God: Sketches and Chronicles of Rome, 1950–1966, trans. Marina Harss.)