Richard

“We are all dying, just at different speeds.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“VI. LOOKING BACKWARD

How the planters, having lost the war for slavery, sought to begin again where they left off in 1860, mere substituting for the individual ownership of slaves, a new state serfdom of black folk.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

“The highest type of leadership maintains itself by its intrinsic worth, sans panoply, pomp and power. Of course, there are never enough real leaders to go around. Wherefore it becomes necessary to dress some men up and by other artificial means to give them a prestige and a power which they could not win by their own resources.”
― Reinhold Niebuhr, Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics (LOA #263): Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic / Moral Man and Immoral Society / The Children ... History

“But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious act and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light