Anthony Knopp

“In darkness, in any light after dusk, you can slit a vein and the blood is black.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“A Hound chased a Hare from his lair, but after a long run, the Hound stopped chasing. A goat-herd who was watching laughed at the Hound and said:

"The little Hare is the better runner of you two!"

The Hound replied:

"But you do not see the difference between us: I was only running for a dinner; he was running for his life.”
― Aesop

“There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying - and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone”
― John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women

“They’ve four hundred thousand samurai between them now. Their base is Kyushu and that island’s safe from my grasp. Together those two could easily subjugate the whole island, then they have limitless troops, limitless food, all the ships necessary for an invasion, all the silk, and Nagasaki. Throughout the land there are perhaps another five or six hundred thousand Christians. Of these, more than half – the Jesuit Christian converts – are samurai, all salted nicely among the forces of all daimyos, a vast pool of potential traitors, spies, or assassins – should the priests order it. And why shouldn’t they? They’d get what they want above life itself: absolute power over all our souls, thus over the soul of this Land of the Gods – to inherit our earth and all that it contains – just as the Anjin-san has explained has already happened fifty times in his New World of theirs . . . They convert a king, then use him against his own kind, until all the land is swallowed up”
― James Clavell, Shogun