Victoria

“Piety can turn the power-hungry into monsters,’ Ead said. ‘They can twist any teaching to justify their actions.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“I made it fifty-fifty. Which is about the cruelest thing you can do to someone you love, give them just enough good to make them stick through a hell of a lot of bad.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“More than eighty thousand undocumented children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, but mostly from the latter, had been detained at the US southern border in just the previous six or seven months. All those children were fleeing circumstances of unspeakable abuse and systematic violence, fleeing countries where gangs had become parastates, had usurped power and taken over the rule of law. They had come to the United States looking for protection, looking for mothers, fathers, or other relatives who had migrated earlier and might take them in. They weren’t looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually goes. The children were merely looking for a way out of their daily nightmare.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“That’s the illusion they preach, the trick you end up believing is real. They tell you true power is dictated by the dictator, because he lives in the ivory tower with his finger on the trigger, but the secret they keep, the part they refuse to tell you during your adolescent indoctrination… is that none of that is true. Real power isn’t dealt in bullets, darlings, but in words. Words that stir a man to stand when all the rest have fled… to fight unwinnable wars, all for the sake of a thought. Every leader who made a difference didn’t do it with a sword or a gun, but with a voice that might have moved a mountain. Think of all the revolutions, all the great religions whose followers once numbered in the billions, and understand me when I tell you: they started with a few delusional fools, conspiring in a room.”
― J.N. Chaney, The Amber Project