josephine

“In war,' answered the weaver, 'the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, and another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Young King: The Star-Child

“To understand the potential impact of contact between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, consider that Native Americans and Europeans had been separated for about 17,000 years before renewed contact literally decimated the indigenous population of the Americas in the sixteenth century. Modern humans and Neanderthals were separated for at least thirty times longer.”
― Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

“But somehow I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.”
― Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell