Patrick Slavin

“Despite the UN secretary-general’s grand title, he was named in the UN Charter as the administrator of the organization. For this reason, former secretary-general Kofi Annan described the position as “more secretary than general.”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to experience this singular wilderness, it was now.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

“from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”: If you can meet with triumph and disaster And treat those two imposters just the same”
― Samantha Power, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir

“The 608-day campaign to liberate Italy would cost 312,000 Allied casualties, equivalent to 40 percent of Allied losses in the decisive campaign for northwest Europe that began at Normandy. Among the three-quarters of a million American troops to serve in Italy, total battle casualties would reach 120,000, including 23,501 killed.”
― Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944