Cara

“Hofstadter fretted that in a “populistic culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy,” democracy was open to being co-opted by “the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes,” where “a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”
― Colin Dickey, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy

“In 1884, the American physician William Pancoast injected sperm from his “best-looking” student into an anesthetized woman—without her knowledge—whose husband had been deemed infertile. Nine months later, she gave birth to a healthy baby. Pancoast eventually told her husband what he had done, but the two men decided to spare the woman the truth. Pancoast’s experiment remained a secret for twenty-five years.”
― Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

“Our correctional practices prioritize vengeance and suffering over justice and rehabilitation. Incarceration in America routinely makes mentally ill people worse. And just as routinely it renders stable people psychiatrically unwell. Our system is quite literally maddening—a truth that categorically undermines our stated goals of safe and secure communities.”
― Christine Montross, Waiting for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration

“Why do we hate our girls so much that history echoes with their screams and the earth is pitted with their unmarked graves?”
― C.J. Tudor, The Burning Girls