Emmy

“History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage to a special and separate category of "otherness" which invalidate our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all. Our institutions and our laws, we tell ourselves, have set the human potentiality for violence about with such restraints that violence in everyday life will be punished as criminal by our laws, while its use by our institutions of state will take the particular form of "civilised warfare.”
― John Keegan, A History of Warfare

“I hope I am not making the insulting error of pretending that democracies are as oppressive as dictatorships – such comparisons are the self-pitying and self-dramatising whines of spoilt Western children.”
― Nick Cohen, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

“What you loved as a child, you will love forever.”
― Francesca Zappia, Made You Up

“There are some socks that shouldn't be washed by your mom.”
― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda