Alex

“Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.”
― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

“Virtually every Chinese citizen whom I came to know well was doing something technically illegal, although usually the infraction was so minor that they didn’t have to worry. It might be a sketchy apartment registration or a small business that bought its products from unlicensed wholesalers. Sometimes, it was comic: late at night, there were always people out walking their dogs in Beijing, because the official dog registration was ridiculously expensive. The dogs were usually ratlike Pekingese, led by sleepy owners who snapped to alertness if they saw a cop. They were guerillas walking toy dogs.”
― Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China

“A man, a life - it was barely worth mentioning. The Visigoths had destroyed the Romans, and had themselves been destroyed by the Muslims. Who were destroyed by the Spanish and Portuguese. You did not need Hitler to see that it was not a pleasant story. And yet here she was. Breathing, having these thoughts. The blood that ran through history would fill every river and ocean, but despite all the butchery, here you were.”
― Philipp Meyer, The Son

“Writing to his son in 1799, John Adams blamed America’s political turmoil on “a systematical dissolution of the true Family Authority. There can never be any regular Government of a Nation without a marked Subordination of Mothers and Children to the Father.” Tellingly, Adams suddenly remembered his forceful wife and urged his son to keep his patriarchal sentiments “a Secret,” for their revelation would “infallibly raise a Rebellion against me.”67 Rather”
― Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804