Everton Patterson

“I have never understood how people can blithely disregard the damage they do by following their hearts.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“The American people are strange in their attitudes toward their idols," he (Taft) mused. They lead them on and then "cut their legs from under them," simply "to make their fall all the greater.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin

“You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Sagamore Hill; but children are better than books.”
― Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography