Carmen

“I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can’t picture. Sometimes, even now, I look on the married girls the way a wild dog might look through the window at tame ones, envying the regularity of their lives but also despising the low pleasure they get from the master’s touch.”
― Louise Erdrich

“It is a very hard undertaking to seek to please everybody.”
― Publilius Syrus, The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus: A Roman Slave

“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
― Robert Jones Jr.

“Where pre-Enlightenment Europe was sporadically cruel, post-Enlightenment Europe was systematically inhumane; where the pre-Enlightenment was haphazardly prejudiced, the Enlightenment was systematically racist, creating a "scientific" hierarchy of humanity that justified imperialism. "Reason" became another name for bourgeois oppression, the triumph of science merely an excuse for more orderly forms of social subjugation.”
― Adam Gopnik