Brian Skinner

“The ships slowly picked their way through, guided from patch to patch of open water by the shouts from the crow’s nest. Tern, cape pigeon and white petrel flew around the ship. Seals on the ice were so slow to take fright that they were easily bludgeoned on the head and brought on board for food. In the stomach of one of them they found 9 lb of granite stones, which puzzled Ross, as they were a thousand miles from the nearest land.”
― Michael Palin, Erebus: One Ship, Two Epic Voyages, and the Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time

“a philosopher, said to the bishop: “But just take a good look at the world; it’s the war of each against all; might is right. Your love one another is nonsense.” “Ah, well,” replied Monseigneur Bienvenu without arguing, “if it’s nonsense, the soul should shut itself up in it like a pearl in an oyster.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“On 24 July, Captain La Corne Saint-Luc left with another body of nearly four hundred Indians and two hundred Canadians. His departure had been delayed for two days – because of a lacrosse tournament between the Abenakis and Iroquois. The game was played with a ball and sticks curved in the shape of a crosier; it was this fancied resemblance to a bishop’s staff that inspired the French name for the tribal sport. The stakes in this grudge-match were high: one thousand crowns worth of wampum in belts and strings. Amongst the Indians, lacrosse was a serious business; it could result in broken bones and even the occasional death; it was not for nothing that the Cherokees dubbed it the little brother of war. The mission communities clustered around Montréal were particular aficionados; a 1743 plan of the settlement at the Lake of the Two Mountains shows an extensive lacrosse field. The neighbouring Caughnawagas were no less dedicated to the game and long remained so; a team of Mohawks from the village toured Britain in 1876. Their dazzling exhibition matches sparked the interest that led to the sport’s adoption, in a slightly less violent form, by British schoolgirls. Even that glum widow Queen Victoria considered the game very pretty to watch. It is unlikely that she would have used the same words to describe the Abenaki-Iroquois clash of July 1758.”
― Stephen Brumwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America

“In Oklahoma, and perhaps elsewhere too, Klan membership was automatically suspended for any man called for jury duty, so that he could deny it and not be excluded for bias.”
― Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition