Phil Brown

“It wasn't necessary for me to stop Anthea's heart. Each death had contributed a little to killing her. There had been so much hope when we'd escaped from the prison, and then the slow dissipation, the gradual abandonment of all expectations, a defeat that had killed everything without a battle. She wondered when it had dawned on us that we were as much prisoners out in the open as we had been behind bars.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.”
― Thomas Paine, Common Sense

“We Americans have many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage and the virtue to do them. But we must face facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to a foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism … ”
― Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt