Jacob

“When a thing happened that had not happened before, a confusion often descended upon people, a fog that fuddled the clearest minds; and often the consequence of such confusion was rejection, and even anger. A fish crawled out of a swamp onto dry land and the other fish were bewildered, perhaps even annoyed that a forbidden frontier had been crossed. A meteorite struck the earth and the dust blocked out the sun but the dinosaurs went on fighting and eating, not understanding that they had been rendered extinct. The birth of language angered the dumb. The shah of Persia, facing the Ottoman guns, refused to accept the end of the age of the sword and sent his calvary to gallop suicidally against the blazing cannons of the Turk. A scientist observed tortoises and mockingbirds and wrote about "random mutation" and "natural selection" and the adherents of the Book of Genesis cursed his name. A revolution in painting was derided and dismissed as mere "Impressionism." A folksinger plugged his guitar into an amp and a voice in the crowd shouted "Judas!”
― Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir

“Principal Fazil was chiefly concerned with maintaining discipline, which required a proper harmony and order between, on the one hand, ther children of respectable families, who in class always sat in the front rows, and, on the other hand, the throngs of poorer boys. He had developed his own brand of thinking on this subject and shared it every Monday during the flag-raising ceremony, distilled as a slogan: "A good education removes the barriers between rich and poor!" Mevlut wasn't quite sure whether Principal Fazil meant to say to his poorer students, "If you study hard and finish school, you, too, will be rich," or whether he meant, "If you study hard and finish school, no one will notice how poor you are.”
― Orhan Pamuk, A Strangeness in My Mind