Sidney Catan

“The U.S. Supreme Court found openly anti-black ordinances unconstitutional in 1917 in Buchanan v. Warley, but sundown towns and suburbs nevertheless acted as if they had the power to be formally all-white until at least 1960; informally, some communities have never given up this idea. The federal government was hardly likely to enforce Buchanan v. Warley until after World War II; on the contrary, it was busily creating all-white suburbs itself until then. After 1917, most sundown suburbs resorted to restrictive covenants. Covenants were usually private, part of the deed one signed when buying from the developer. Like the Great Retreat, restrictive covenants first targeted Chinese Americans in the West, originating in California in the 1890s, and then spread to the East, where Jews and blacks were targeted for exclusion.”
― James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

“When the faithful are asked whether God really exists, they often begin by talking about the enigmatic mysteries of the universe and the limits of human understanding. ‘Science cannot explain the Big Bang,’ they exclaim, ‘so that must be God’s doing.’ Yet like a magician fooling an audience by imperceptibly replacing one card with another, the faithful quickly replace the cosmic mystery with the worldly lawgiver. After giving the name of ‘God’ to the unknown secrets of the cosmos, they then use this to somehow condemn bikinis and divorces. ‘We do not understand the Big Bang – therefore you must cover your hair in public and vote against gay marriage.’ Not only is there no logical connection between the two, but they are in fact contradictory. The deeper the mysteries of the universe, the less likely it is that whatever is responsible for them gives a damn about female dress codes or human sexual behaviour.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“It was good to see her laugh. Even if it was at me.”
― Chuck Dixon, Birds of Prey (1999-2009) #8

“Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe.”
― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed