Sarah

“Certainly, some reading material merits a quick read, but habitual skimming is for the mind what a steady diet of fast food is for the body.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“Yet, by March 9, when Italy imposed its first lockdown, the country had suffered only about nine thousand coronavirus cases and five hundred deaths. With one of the world’s oldest populations and harsh northern winters, Italy regularly suffered severe winter flu epidemics. In the winter of 2014–2015 and again in 2016–2017, influenza and other flu-like illnesses had killed more than forty thousand Italians—eighty times as many as had died from the coronavirus at the time of the lockdown.”
― Alex Berenson, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives

“People tell boring lies about politics, God, and love. You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, Vintage Muggeridge: Religion and Society