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About this quote

What does it mean?
Terrorists, whether violent or cultural, are shaped by their early experiences and childhood. Origins deeply influence destructive paths.
In plain terms
People who become terrorists, using force or ideas, are often driven by their early years.
What can you take from it?
Early experiences shape who becomes destructive later.

Where it applies

  • radicalization
  • social work
  • education

Putting it to work

  • early intervention
  • healing trauma
  • preventing violence

Questions to consider

  • How does childhood affect choices?
  • Can people change after trauma?

Another view

Adult choices still matter beyond childhood influences.

More from Albert Camus

  1. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy,…

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  2. Philosophy secularizes the ideal. But tyrants appear who soon secularize the philosophies that give them the right to do so.

    Permalink to quote #185
  3. 'Only the modern city,' Hegel dares to write, 'offers the mind a field in which it can become aware of itself.' We are thus living in the period of big cities.…

    Permalink to quote #182

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