Ellen Speicher

“Ah, this is the constitution,” he said. “Now, mark my words. So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual interests, mutual welfare, and mutual happiness. But when we become old and corrupt, it will bind us no longer.”
― Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

“They ticked the boxes of a certain kind of enlightened, educated middle-classness, the love of dresses that were more interesting than pretty, the love of the eclectic, the love of what they were supposed to love. Ifemelu imagined them when they traveled: they would collect unusual things and fill their homes with them, unpolished evidence of their polish.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Am I then more of an American than those who drew their first breath on American ground? Or what is it that thus torments me at a circumstance so calmly viewed by almost everybody else? Am I a fool, a romantic Quixote, or is there a constitutional defect in the American mind? Were it not for yourself and a few others, I…would say…there is something in our climate which belittles every animal, human or brute…. I disclose to you without reserve the state of my mind. It is discontented and gloomy in the extreme. I consider the cause of good government as having been put to an issue and the verdict against it.”
― Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

“At the same time the cholera epidemic sweeping through Europe struck Paris, bringing not only suffering and death, but also social unrest. As often happens, people began to blame the authorities and supposed carriers of the disease, and there were instances of group violence which sometimes ended in murder, as well as a surge in petty crime. The year 1833 saw strikes and riots in Lyon, Saint-Étienne, Nantes, Avignon and Paris, but they were almost entirely concerned with working conditions and food.8”
― Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848