Everton Patterson

“Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

“But Henry wasn’t a parent, and he didn’t understand that when you were, almost nothing was more satisfying than seeing your kid sleep.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“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