Brendan

“The Boss is the perfect blend of Elvis and Dylan, come from New Jersey (America’s armpit) to save the seventies from further Mellotron arabesques and Minimoog, with a stars-and-stripes ass to die for snugly fitted jeans on the cover of Born in the U.S.A., the minstrel descending the Lincoln Memorial staircase to crown Obama, the knight in shining armor for the Super Bowl halftime show, the musical equivalent to fried chicken wings and the E pluribus unum motto engraved on the national crest.”
― Leonardo Colombati, Bruce Springsteen: Like a Killer in the Sun: Selected Lyrics 1972-2017

“The dissolution of monasteries under Henry VIII and the subsequent reorganization of agriculture was another step that altered the balance of power in rural England. The slow growth in the real incomes of the English peasantry before the beginning of the industrial era was a consequence of this type of drift.”
― Daron Acemoğlu, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

“The atmosphere in the hall is electric with anticipation, as it might be for Bruce Springsteen at a sold-out concert or at a public appearance at Buckingham Palace by the queen of England. Indeed, this hall is also packed with breathless and enthusiastic devotees. But the star the audience is waiting for is not a musician or a queen, but a simple-living, elderly rabbi—the Rebbe or grand rabbi of the exclusively Hasidic village of New Square, New York. And what he will do is not entertain but simply light a Chanukah menorah.”
― Joseph Berger, The Pious Ones

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. —Abraham Lincoln”
― Steven D. Price, 1001 Smartest Things Ever Said