The More Things Change Quotes

“I am near fourteen and have never yet seen a hanging. My life is barren.”
― Karen Cushman, Catherine, Called Birdy

“Wagons rattling and banging,
horses neighing and snorting,
conscripts marching, each with bow and arrows at his hip,
fathers and mothers, wives and children, running to see them off--
so much dust kicked up you can't see Xian-yang Bridge!
And the families pulling at their clothes, stamping feet in anger,
blocking the way and weeping--
ah, the sound of their wailing rises straight up to assault heaven.
And a passerby asks, "What's going on?"
The soldier says simply, "This happens all the time.
From age fifteen some are sent to guard the north,
and even at forty some work the army farms in the west.
When they leave home, the village headman has to wrap their turbans for them;
when they come back, white-haired, they're still guarding the frontier.
The frontier posts run with blood enough to fill an ocean,
and the war-loving Emperor's dreams of conquest have still not ended.”
― Tu Fu

“The women of Juarez, and women across the world, do not want to have to take revenge, any more than Procne and Philomela did. What they want is to be able to rely on the modern gods -- the police, the courts, and the media -- for justice.”
― Helen Morales, Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths

“The tribe of clerks was an obvious one...the junior clerks of flash houses--young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious lips. Setting aside a certain dapperness of carriage, which may be termed [i]deskism[/i] for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to be an exact fac-simile of what had been the perfection of [i]bon ton[/i] about twelve or eighteen months before.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd - an Edgar Allan Poe Short Story

“Some countries believe that, once they have rid themselves of a monarchy and become a republic, they have morphed into a kind of Utopia. When, in fact, they have merely created another set of compromises for themselves.”
― Stewart Stafford

“...but as he just happened to jump on to the teeth of a rake which had been left lying there after the hay-making, the handle of it struck against his face and gave him a tremendous blow. (The Seven Swabians)”
― Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales

“The General’s preoccupation with electronic gadgetry irked Randall. The world had become a wondrous fabric of instant communication, linking millions of people in the same old abundance of problems and poverty of solutions.”
― Fletcher Knebel, Trespass