Cyril Ledain

“We had old architects and were working with what we had on hand. You’ve hired this new, young architect now, and, Pericles, I’m going to build you a statue of Athena—all gold and ivory, think of that, Pericles—and taller than our city walls.” Pericles raised his eyes toward the birds.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“Survival without renunciation of any part of one’s own moral world – apart from powerful and direct interventions by fortune – was conceded only to very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of martyrs and saints.”
― Primo Levi, If This Is A Man/The Truce: 'Miraculous' Philippe Sands

“Hope—cruelest of the evils that escaped Pandora’s box—smiled on him gently all that summer.”
― Mary Doria Russell, Doc

“much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.90 This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion