Paula Willey

“Oh yes," said Nanny Piggins. "I can regale people with anecdotes from my sordid past and think at the same time.”
― R.A. Spratt, The Adventures of Nanny Piggins

“quoting Kipling, "I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to mankind.”
― Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson

“Swords, Lances, arrows, machine guns, and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of nations than the typhus louse, the plague flea, and the yellow-fever mosquito. Civilizations have retreated from the plasmodium of malaria, and armies have crumbled into rabbles under the onslaught of cholera spirilla, or of dysentery and typhoid bacilli. Huge areas have bee devastated by the trypanosome that travels on the wings of the tsetse fly, and generations have been harassed by the syphilis of a courtier. War and conquest and that herd existence which is an accompaniment of what we call civilization have merely set the stage for these more powerful agents of human tragedy.”
― Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History