Ashley (Red-Haired Ash Reads)

“Information is necessary, to be sure, but it is never sufficient. Information must also be believed.”
― Jonathan Freedland, The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

“It’s a tiresome and, unfortunately, still true fact that, if men like something a woman does, they assume another man must have helped her do it. If they hate something a woman did, on the other hand, they assume a man must have made her do it.”
― Jennifer Wright, Madame Restell: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York's Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist

“Only when information is combined with belief does it become knowledge, and only knowledge leads to action.”
― Jonathan Freedland, The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

“The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls—and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.”
― Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present