David Cunningham

“The adult being is an emergent entity who must be understood at his own level and in his own totality. The truly salient issues are malleability and flexibility, not fallacious parsing by percentages. A trait may be 90 percent heritable, yet entirely malleable. A twenty-dollar pair of eyeglasses from the local pharmacy may fully correct a defect of vision that is 100 percent heritable. A “60 percent” biodeterminist is not a subtle interactionist, but a determinist on the “little bit pregnant” model.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man

“The primary division of society was not that between rich and poor but between citizens and non-citizens. The benefactors of cities gave to their “fellow citizens” and never to the poor. Some of these citizens might well be poor, but their poverty in itself entitled them to nothing. They received entertainment, public comforts (such as great bathhouses), and (in many cities) considerable doles of food. But they did not receive them on the basis of need. They received them because they were members of a privileged group.”
― Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD

“In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months
waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the
crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue
from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before.
Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a
whisper (everyone whispered there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been
her face . . .
—Anna Akhmatova, “Instead of a Preface: Requiem 1935–1940”
― Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History

“If you love freedom, then you are going to have to pay for it. Not only by paying taxes but by making the commitment to live by the principles that are essential for freedom to survive. That includes respecting the rule of law and if you have set that aside for political reasons, then you are a threat to our democracy and our freedoms.”
― RJ Intindola – (Gandolfo) – 2018