Katherine Coble

“In my country, we all participated. It is not enough to say that Hitler dragged the rest of us, kicking and screaming, to do his bidding. We did it willingly. That will be the scar that will never heal. Nor should it. We betrayed our neighbours, we took the precious possessions of those people the system deemed to be not in keeping with the perfect Aryan ideal – we did it. Us. The German people. The country that created Wagner and Dürer and Nietzsche also created Himmler, Goebbels and Göring. They didn’t drop from the sky, something alien. No. They were of my people, the Brownshirts who smashed up Jewish property, who humiliated Jews in the streets, who shipped them off to die in conditions that do not even bear thinking about – we all did it. We drove the trains, we sold their clothes, we moved into their houses, we spent their money. And even if we didn’t do those things, we kept our heads down while it all went on around us. All but a small few of us have blood on our hands, and now and for the rest of time, we must pay.”
― Jean Grainger, Return to Robinswood

“The Creator was immensely wise and charitable when He forbade us knowledge of the future, while He has vouchsafed us the delights of memory and the enchantments of hope.”
― Maurice Druon, The Accursed Kings Series: The Iron King / The Strangled Queen / The Poisoned Crown

“there is another type of discrimination in the industry that exists in a subtler, more ambient form, not unlike the attitudes that led to the selection of Lena’s image and turned her into an industry icon. Women in tech are held back not only by overt sexism and sexual harassment but also by less obvious and still dangerous patterns of behavior that are difficult to pinpoint and call out. Several tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, have been the target of gender discrimination lawsuits, some with class action status, representing other female employees.”
― Emily Chang, Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

“English medieval history is impossible to understand without France, which exerted a huge cultural influence over its northern neighbor well into the modern era, and so the story of the Seven Kingdoms is not just that of England but rather Britain, France, and Spain in one. In Martin’s words, “Westeros is much much MUCH bigger than Britain. More the size (though not the shape, obviously) of South America.”9 Although the Seven Kingdoms all speak the same language, they are varied in their ancestry and racial appearance, while the geography varies hugely; so, while the five most northerly kingdoms correspond to Britain, the Reach strongly resembles France and Dorne is Moorish Spain. Paris is the model for King’s Landing, and in the books appears far less tropical than in the television series, which is filmed in Malta and Croatia.10”
― Ed West, Iron, Fire and Ice: The real history behind Game of Thrones