Regarding travel with a mission

Rufus Jones, the Haverford professor, went to Germany with two other men; Robert Yarnall, a Quaker businessman, and George Walton, a principal of a Quaker boarding school.  They hoped to talk to someone in authority, perhaps Hitler, about the suffering of the Jews.  Before he left, Jones wrote some names and addresses in his notebook, and he wrote: "We need the note of adventure, of the heroic and costly, not the twittering of birds over a volcano." He was seventy-five years old.

From Nicholson Baker's remarkable new history book, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.