Daniel Cox

“Out of a bleak world of enmity and despair had come a tall, blond, blue-eyed Texan who loved Russia and its music with humble reverence. He had old-fashioned courtliness, a touchingly eager manner, and a spectacular way with the piano that transported them to a half-remembered past. Music that depicted the many cruelties and brutalities of that past was not for him: the Russia he summoned up with his hands was a place of magnificence, beauty, and romance.”
― Nigel Cliff, Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story-How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War

“Gun rights are claimed as an American birthright and clothed in the dignity of the Constitution, but this is a false and fabricated history. To believe in the gun, you have to subscribe to a series of fantasies about the American past. You have to believe Theodore Roosevelt when he says that guns civilized the West and that the men who died “generally” deserved their fate. You have to believe Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas when he writes that firearms brought “possibilities of salvation” to African Americans after the Civil War. You would have to believe that, for two hundred years, every court in the land got the Second Amendment wrong, until Antonin Scalia rode in with his dictionaries in 2008.”
― Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy

“On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals. The lion kills the baboon; the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees, dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love. The hungry antelope’s shadow passes over the startled grass. And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that would like to kill us first. And swallow quinine pills. The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Screen for troublemakers, and all will be well! Not only is the theory flawed on the practical level, but this doctrine of innocence is one of the engines of violence in America: an inducement to kill based on an illusion of purity. The good guy, it seems, is not the solution: he’s the problem. The first truth of the gun culture is a raging myth.”
― Dominic Erdozain, One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy