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In 1916, as the shadow of the Great War made English-speaking people suspicious of loyalties, a governor of Iowa... William L. Harding decreed that henceforth it would be a crime to speak any foreign language in schools, at church, or ever over the telephone in the great state of Iowa. "There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English ... God is listening only to the English tongue."

At the peak of the Red Scare, 32 of the 48 states had loyalty oaths of one kind or another. In New York ... it was necessary to swear a loyalty oath to gain a fishing permit. The Communist Control Act of 1954 made it a federal offense to communicate any Communist thoughts by any means, including by semaphore. In Connecticut it became illegal to criticize the government, or to speak ill of the American flag.

Altogether between 1946 and 1962, the United States detonated just over a thousand nuclear warheads, including some three hundred in the open air, hurling numberless tons of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The USSR, China, Britain, and France detonated scores more.

As many as four nuclear detonations a month were conducted in Nevada in the peak years. The mushroom clouds were visible from any parking lot in the city, but most visitors went to the edge of the blast zone itself, often with picnic lunches, to watch the tests and enjoy the fallout afterward. ... Radioactive dust often drifted across Las Vegas, leaving a visible coating on every horizontal surface.

Moms worried about the berries, too, and were forever shouting from the kitchen window not to eat them, which was actually unnecessary because children of the 1950s didn't eat anything that grew wild--in fact, didn't eat anything at all unless it was coated in sugar, endorsed by a celebrity athlete or TV star, and came with a free prize.

Every summer, at the start of the mosquito season, a city employee ... would come to the neighborhood and drive madly all over the place ... with a fogging machine that pumped out dense, colorful clouds of insecticide through which at least eleven thousand children scampered joyously for most of the day. ... For years afterward whenever I coughed into a white handkerchief I brought up a little ring of colored powder.

I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950s. No country had ever known such prosperity. When the war ended the United States had $26 billion worth of factories that hadn't existed before the war, $140 billion in savings and war bonds just waiting to be spent, no bomb damage, and practically no competition.

Scorpions as a species will likely survive nuclear war. Arachnida with book lungs have been around for hundreds of millions of years. Scorpions came before the dinosaurs, they lived through the dinosaurs' extinction, and will likely outlive humans. After nuclear World War III, the scorpions' hard shells will protect them from the radiation that will kill off most of the humans who manage to initially survive ...

The consequences of a nuclear conflict between Russia and NATO are cataclysmic. A 2020 computer simulation by nuclear weapons scholars with Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security found that a nuclear exchange between Russia and NATO would almost certainly escalate quickly, leading to the death and injury of nearly 100 million people in the first few hours.

For me, the presence of God is in the very struggle to understand Him, the struggle to come to terms with His existence. I have felt Him most strongly at the moment when I doubted Him most. Doubt is the thing that calls Him to me. It is on the point of untroubled belief that I lose Him.

... how can you have a morally good state founded on injustice?

Still, is it in the nature of love to seek freedom or bondage?

And yet, he had lost his soul.
It wasn't that Henry had led him to the realization. He had not been persuaded. Rather, he heard the words and knew they were true. The minute he heard them, he felt not only the desolation in their meaning but also the exaltation. The words held him like a mirror. They called out for that which he had never been able to accomplish: surrender.

How he had struggled against the very idea of soul, or at least against the idea that lay behind it: God, the great intruder. You could not have one without the other, no soul without God, and he had always felt disdain for the idea of God, for the idea of divine presence, for the idea of a merciful watchman.

It's true the future ripens in the past and the past rots in the future, but how difficult it is, at times, to remember the long parade of the dead, their struggle for every yard of highway, every tree cut, every brick laid.

... democracy is an endless argument about democracy, but it's infinitely preferable to the silence of tyranny.
- ... Democracy is rule by the people, or by the people's chosen representatives. It isn't an argument, it's a form of government. And the problem is our chosen representatives behave one way when they're seeking election and another way once they're elected. Once they're elected they serve power and money.

But why shouldn't prisons be civilized? ... not of a penitentiary but of a place created as art, as an institution that helped strengthen community ... one whose effect was ennobling on a number of levels: aesthetic, social, political, perhaps even religious. A building, that is, to civilize those who passed through it or lived within. A building that would do what great art does: enrich the soul.

Drawn as a diagram, the military chain of command resembles a pyramid of power. There are lots of people at the bottom. The president, as commander in chief, sits at the top.
The US president -- as odd as this may seem -- has sole authority to launch America's nuclear weapons.
The president asks permission of no one.

... Franklin ... had come to accept that there is no political achievement without self-regard or ruthlessness, or self-regard and ruthlessness or, for that matter, ruthless self-regard.

(A recent Congressional Budget Office report indicates Pentagon missile defense costs from 2020 to 2029 could reach $176 billion.)

He was, for instance, devoutly Conservative, liberalism being to him a vile cast of mind. (It had its purpose, of course, what with democracy being, at very least, a two-stroke engine. Still, there was something about the word that suggested a deluge, a deluge of false emotion, hypocritical concern, and endless squirming.)

... forget. You have nothing to lose but you chains.
But I don't happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

To live is to be marked, she said without speaking. To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

God grants us long enough lives to punish ourselves.

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with a clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune.

For women like me, it seems, its not ours to take charge of beginnings and endings. Not the marriage proposal, the summit conquered, the first shot fired ... Let men write those stories. I can't. I only know the middle ground where we live our lives. We whistle while Rome burns, or we scrub the floor, depending. Don't dare presume there's shame in the lot of a woman who carries on.

Oh, it's a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it's easy to cast curses like stones on our ancestors. But that's nothing more than cursing ourselves and all that made us.

I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year. History didn't cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion.

"Don't expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go badly, you will blame yourself."
"What...?"
"I am telling you what I'm telling you. Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky."