jonsmith

“They were a devout family to whom religion was a source of comfort and hope, not anxiety. Their religious feelings did not instantly reform Martin’s own thoughts, but they must at least have intrigued him and given him some notion that religion might be something other than frightening.”
― Charles L. Mee Jr., White Robe, Black Robe: Pope Leo X, Martin Luther, and the Birth of the Reformation

“They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble. Millions of pounds of public money wasn’t regularly siphoned into their neighbourhoods in the hope of bribing, cajoling or coercing them into civic virtue. If they protested that their cities had become alien, their children taught in overcrowded schools where 90 per cent of the children spoke no English, they were lectured about the cardinal sin of racism by those more expensively and comfortably circumstanced. Unprotected by accountants, they were the milch-cows of the rapacious Revenue. No lucrative industry of social concern and psychological analysis had grown up to analyse and condone their inadequacies on the grounds of deprivation or poverty.”
― P.D. James, The Private Patient

“unalert yet sometimes suffused through and through by an inward light, is characteristic of the primitive and of the child (and also of those moments of religious and artistic inspiration that occur ever less and less often as a Culture grows older) right”
― Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West, Vols 1-2

“In its easiness of grammatical construction, in its paucity of inflexion, in its almost total disregard of the distinctions of gender excepting those of nature, in the simplicity and precision of its terminations and auxiliary verbs, not less than the majesty, vigour and copiousness of its expression, our mother-tongue seems well adapted by organization to become the language of the world.”
― Melvyn Bragg, The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language