Jack Collens

“Surveys show that a large proportion of veiled women hold progressive views on such matters as gender. For some women, who have come from rural areas to the university and are the first members of their family to advance beyond basic literacy, the assumption of Islamic dress provides continuity and makes their rite of passage to modernity less traumatic than it might otherwise have been.”
― Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History

“In school, whenever I had to do something like memorize the periodic table, my father would say the key to doing boring tasks is to think about not so much what you’re doing but the importance of why you’re doing it. Though when I asked him if slavery wouldn’t have been less psychologically damaging if they’d thought of it as “gardening,” I got a vicious beating that would’ve made Kunta Kinte wince.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Men had always taken for themselves the prerogative to decide for women, unilaterally determining what women should do, prescribing what they must not do, announcing which rights women were “entitled” to have. Men decided what was “best” for women, without their consultation or consent, then wrote laws to codify this judgment. That was the way of the world, learned men liked to say, claiming God had bestowed upon them such authority: one half of humanity held dominion over the other half, by right of a certain shape of genitalia.”
― Elaine F. Weiss, The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote

“Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.”
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women