Shawn Garbett

“War for the Aztecs was thus not a description of a situation in which there were only two opposites but was the one and eternal order itself, supremely right and supremely acceptable because it carried no possibility of a negation.

A people with this belief will readily accept human sacrifice as the end for which all wars are waged. They can even be led, through deepening piety and the increase of superstitious terrors, to draw out the drama of human sacrifice until, in its acceleration, it could become self-sustaining.”
― Burr Brundage

“and a fact is the most stubborn thing in the world.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in 'Dracula' is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read 'Dracula.”
― Joe Queenan

“... a real program of social and economic reform [in Vietnam] would have involved a real conflict ... between the peasants ... and the landlords and the city people... [it] was difficult ... because it required a concern for the peasants ... it was those capacities ... its American supporters lacked.”
― Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam