Preston Johnson

“The Westerner has been able move forward in ordered steps, while we have met superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years. The missteps and inconveniences this has caused have, I think, been many. If we had been left alone we might not be much further now in a material way than we were five hundred years ago. Even now in the Indian and Chinese countryside life no doubt goes on much as it did when Buddha and Confucius were alive. But we would have gone only in a direction that suited us. We would have gone ahead very slowly, and yet it is not impossible that we would one day have discovered our own substitute for the trolley, the radio, the airplane of today. They would have been no borrowed gadgets, they would have been the tools of our culture, suited to us.”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

“History allows us to see patterns and make judgements. It sketches for us the structures within which we can seek freedom. It reveals moments, each one of them different, none entirely unique. To understand one moment is to see the possibility of being cocreator of another.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - Graphic Edition

“The virtue argument, by contrast, rests on a judgement that greed is a vice that the state should discourage. But who is to judge what is virtue and what is vice? Don't citizens of pluralist societies disagree about such things? And isn't it dangerous to impose judgements about virtue through law?”
― Michael J Sandel

“For among mortal powers, only imagination can bring back the dead.”
― Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943