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In Russia, before Peter's time, there was little that could be called industry. Scattered through the towns were small factories and workshops for household implements, handicrafts and tools which met the needs of tsar, boyars and merchants. In the villages, peasants made everything for themselves. - p. 790 (Chapter 59 - 'COMMERCE BY DECREE')

"... to them [the Americans] all yellow people are guilty until proven innocent. Americans are a confused people because they can't admit this contradiction. They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can't have both." - pp. 189-190.

"The [French] Ministers would not accept [Premier Paul Reynaud] as a substitute for Churchill, ... They naturally believed that [as of June 13th, 1940] a defenceless Britain could not succeed where their Army, which they had thought so strong, had failed. Only Churchill could have persuaded them that Britain not only had a chance but genuinely believed in ultimate victory." - p. 232.

-- p. 134.

"[General] Weygand [commander of the French armies in the West] had ... informed [Lord] Lloyd [a Conservative M.P.] that he had taken upon himself [on June 10th, 1940] the decision to declare Paris an open town, and had written to [Premier Paul] Reynaud to tell him so. The politicians could not make up their minds, and he [Weygand] was not going to allow Paris to be destroyed for no purpose." -- p. 134.

"The sketchy news of the fighting that came in driblets in the late evening [of June 6th, 1940] did not sound very good. The enemy had reached the Bresle River south of Tréport, and appeared to have gained a footing on the heights overlooking the Aisne. Again the Chemin des Dames of horrible memory [from the First World War] was mentioned." - p. 100.

"A French General Staff note of June 6th, 1940, gave the French losses in Belgium and at Dunkirk as 370,000. It was claimed that 150,000 escaped, of whom two-thirds were evacuated from Dunkirk and the remaining third fell back behind the Somme." - p. 37.

`"My job [as of May 30th, 1940] seemed odious. I talked while lives, younger and more valuable to the country than mine, were being destroyed. And it seemed suddenly unbearable to see at close hand the France I had cared for so very much collapsing before my eyes."
- p. 291.

`"That evening [May 29th, 1940] occurred one of the few pleasant incidents of this nightmare period. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the aviator, ... now a Captain in the French Air Force... asked me to dine in a small restaurant on the Avenue de la Grande Armée together with a cousin of his, a very charming woman... at whose houses I had met him several times in Paris and in the country before the war." -- p. 273.

`"[on May 27th, 1940]...I heard Weygand say to the Marshal [Pétain]: 'If only Gort [commander of British forces in France] had counter-attacked with more vigour,...the Belgians...might have resisted longer.' 'Mon Général, ' I broke in, 'that... is a very unfair comment. ... it is surely evident from the little we do know that Lord Gort...may be in a position to mitigate the blow dealt us by the Belgian collapse.'

`"... I realized with a sinking heart [this was on May 26th, 1940] that the attempt of the Northern Armies to break southwards had been given up. It was to be Dunkirk. Later that afternoon I realized that there was indeed no other choice." - p. 222.

".Weygand [General; the C.-in-C. of the French Army]... turned his head towards Reynaud [during a meeting on May 25, 1940 in Paris], and said with a voice like a saw on steel: 'This war is sheer madness, we have gone to war with a 1918 army against a German Army of 1939. It is sheer madness. What sort of air force have we got? ...; our tanks are inadequate and insufficient, ridiculously few in number.' " - p. 190.

"... the general impression [from the meeting of Parliament on May 7th, 1940] was that the Government was doomed. That the Prime Minister would be forced to reconstruct it, there was no doubt. Even the most fervent Conservatives agreed that most of the old gang must go, but would the Socialists serve under Chamberlain? If they would not, then he would have to resign." - p. 122.

"Tacitly admitting the impaired morale of the French nation, undermined by the constant reiteration that it was England's war and that Germany had no quarrel with France, [Prime Minister Paul} Reynaud argued [in March 1940] that German retaliation would hit France alone." - p. 95.

{Georges] "Mandel [then the French Minister for the Colonies as of November 1, 1939]... went on to say that it was imperative that the English should take over the direction of the war, and, as this rôle was apparently beyond Chamberlain, the sooner Churchill was in charge, the better." - p. 60

"A few days after this visit to Chartwell [where Spears had lunch with Winston Churchill on August 1st, 1939] I was in France with my car. Being convinced we should be at war in a few weeks and that this was likely to be my last holiday for years, I crossed the Channel on the day after the House adjourned for the recess." - p. 3

Days bleed away while the Italians continue building roads and bull-dozing mountains and throwing innocent people off high cliffs. They have been destroying villages and demolishing huts while constructing square homes with sharp corners and installing Italian families and merchants. --- p. 362.

A soldato pushes his way out of the gaping crowd and dances awkwardly next to Aster [one of the women warriors who had been captured by the Italians and stripped naked]. He mimics a ghastly, cruel version of eskesta, ...The men whistle and cheer. … Aster spins, feet alighting on tiptoe then heel,... as another soldier jumps into the circle and drapes an arm around her waist. His movements are sloppy and ugly.

"As Kidane's army, new recruits and seasoned fighters, prepares to separate into groups that will surround the Italians, the Shadow King and his female guard step forward onto that highest crest and gaze below. The army looks up and grows silent, awed by the presence of Emperor Haile Selassie, thrown into speechlessness by the sight of the guard who steps forward, resplendent in her uniform."

"[Dawson] tried to remember what he knew about Langston. Was he the president of a Negro college? The head of a Negro law school? He'd run for Congress in Virginia, but things had gone wrong. Election fraud, voter suppression, intimidation, the usual mess. They were shameless in Virginia." - p. 154.

“… one hundred thousand men, however ravenous they might be for this beautiful land [Ethiopia], can never total the numbers of Ethiopians intent on keeping their country free, regardless of mathematics.”

"Chicago seemed an unreal city whose mythical houses were built of slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of gray smoke, houses whose foundations were sinking slowly into the dank prairie. Flashes of steam showed intermittently on the wide horizon, ... The din of the city entered my consciousness, entered to remain for years to come. The year was 1927." -- p. 261.

"When I read a Negro newspaper I never caught the faintest echo of my preoccupation in its pages. I felt trapped and occasionally, ..., I would stop reading. But a vague hunger would come over me for books, books that opened up new avenues of feeling and seeing, and again I would forge another note to the white librarian. ...I would read... feeling that I carried a secret, criminal burden about with me..." - p.252

"I was in my fifteenth year [1923]; in terms of schooling I was far behind the average youth of the nation, but I did not know that. In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed." - p. 169.

“I wasn’t sure if I wanted you ... I’ve had to shut down my feelings, too, ... but you pulled me to you and ... I felt your mouth open my c.… lips like you love to do and I placed my hands on my t---s and you started to play with my nipples while you were eating me, sucking me off till I came into your mouth with deep grunts and ...I played with you with my mouth and my fingers till you got hard again." – p. 21.

“The rage of being rejected. It’s one thing to be with a guy and see that he’s losing interest and maybe you are too, and quite another to have built a family and two literary careers and a house and eighteen years of shared companionship, the passion still going full swing in spite of the mounting tensions, and to feel the plug being pulled out overnight without warning.” -- p. 6.

"... the slaves knew very well that Thomas Jefferson had died penniless, bankrupt, with a lottery on his land and his creditors hounding him to his very last breath. And they knew, too, that sooner or later Monticello, as had his other plantations, would fall." - pp. 326-327.

"Thomas Jefferson was happy. He had deeply missed the pleasures of Monticello. He had missed his slave wife. How many times when he had been away from her had he imagined his hands riding over that beautiful body, seizing it as if it were handfuls of his own buff clay Monticello earth; the fragile woman's landscape of her turning, twisting, rising, and falling under his hands;" - p. 297.

“Daughter, you don’t understand white men. They loves you. Sometimes all they lives. But when you go up against they real life, they white life, white friends, white children, white power, you got to lose. You got to be cut down. You got to be put away. Thomas Jefferson’s real mistress is his politics. ... Nothing will stand in the way of that.” – p. 246.