Jayanth

“Venerable the scorn of the Jews for the Ishmaelites may have been; but it was nothing like so savage as their loathing for the Romans.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“By AD 800, so redeemed was Arabic from the contempt in which it had once been held that its sound had come to rank as the very music of power, and its cursives as things of pure beauty, refined to a rare and exquisite perfection by the art of its calligraphers.

Among the Arabs, the written word was on the verge of becoming a mania. One scholar, when he died in 822, left behind him a library that filled a whole six hundred trunks.”
― Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

“When they get in trouble, they send for the sons-of-bitches”
― James D. Hornfischer, The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944-1945

“do do-gooders understand that it is flawed humans, weak humans, ordinary humans, whom we love?”
― Larissa MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help