Robert

“I believe that children in this country need a more robust literary diet than they are getting…. I will never talk down to, or draw down to, children.”
― Barbara Cooney

“When kindness comes at the expense of truth, it is not a kindness worth having.”
― Rachel Simmons, The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence

“Only years of practice will teach you the mysteries and bold certainty of a real gardener, who treads at random, yet tramples on nothing.”
― Karel Čapek

“The president is a nationalist, which is not at all the same thing as a patriot. A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, 'although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,' wrote Orwell, tends to be 'uninterested in what happens in the real world.' Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism 'has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.'

A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century