“Nothing is so distasteful and clogging as abundance.” ― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays #BookSky

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays #BookSky

“one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mostly—endemic to the system.” ― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games #BookSky

“The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless.” ― Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas #BookSky

“You have to understand, the underground, it became a cult,” says Fink. “Weather, it was a cult. The SLA. The sixties drove them all crazy, all of us. All they did was listen to their own people, their own opinions.” ― Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage #BookSky

“When I put the question of legacy to Sekou Odinga, he heaved a heavy sigh and crossed his hands in his lap. He was sixty-eight the day we spoke.

“the next force is sentimentalism, of course. You know, amongst us socialism spreads principally through sentimentalism.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons #BookSky

“You can be quite sure that all who cease to understand their own people and lose their ties with them, immediately and to the same extent, also lose the faith of their fathers, and either become atheists or indifferent.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons #BookSky

“conserving capital and insuring the welfare of children—the two basic societal functions for marriage everywhere” ― Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress #BookSky

“I often wonder what I'd do if there weren't any books in the world.” ― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room #BookSky

“At the first instant I had angrily asked myself who this stranger was who had done me a violence and the stranger was myself, the child I once was whom the book had revived in me, for recognising only the child in me,

“how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?” ― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time #BookSky

“Unkindness is inspired by hatred, anger fuels it into action in which there is no great joy; it would take sadism to turn it into something pleasurable; unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind.” ― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way #BookSky

“when it was discovered that he was a pleasant and serious young man with no special talent and no gift for teaching, he had been put in charge of the freshman English program.” ― John Williams, Stoner #BookSky

“all of our past education will in some ways hinder us; for our habits of thinking about the nature of experience have determined our own expectations as radically as the habits of medieval man determined his.” ― John Williams, Stoner #BookSky

“Even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent,

“People don't know when they are happy. They're never so unhappy as they think they are.” ― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way #BookSky

“no history is complete without the history of the history.” ― Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong BookSky

“In our element we were unstoppable. We owned the night, and the darkness could not hide our prey.” ― Marty Skovlund Jr., Violence of Action: The Untold Stories of the 75th Ranger Regiment in the War on Terror #BookSky

“she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.” ― Jane Austen, Persuasion #BookSky

Anne Elliot was not out of his thoughts, when he more seriously described the woman he should wish to meet with. ‘A strong mind, with sweetness of manner,’ made the first and the last of the description.” ― Jane Austen, Persuasion #BookSky

“Hypocrisy, which nowadays is supported by two methods, the quasi-religious and the quasi-scientific, has attained such proportions,

“The more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are;

“One might succeed in explaining to the dullest of men the most difficult of problems, if he had no previous conception in regard to them;

“Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.” ― Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener #BookSky

“Money can't buy a happy life, or a peaceful death.” ― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol #BookSky

“Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” ― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol #BookSky

“fascism, far from being a political aberration whose greatest plausibility was confined to Europe and the interval between the two World Wars, is the normal condition of the modern state: the condition to which the governments of all industrially advanced countries tend.” ― Susan Sontag #BookSky

“Deprived of all economic, religious, and educational functions, the family exists solely as a source of emotional warmth in a cold world.” ― Susan Sontag, On Women #BookSky

“In so-called Third World countries, the situation of women with respect to men is tyrannically, brutally colonialist.” ― Susan Sontag, On Women #BookSky

“In the morning when the Sun returns. It’s possible for us to hope.” ― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun #BookSky

“What was going out of the world was the understanding that it was worthwhile to care about other people. Few people lived in a neighborhood any more. Life was being organized to keep people distant from one another.” ― Roderick Thorp, Nothing Lasts Forever (Die Hard #1) #BookSky

“I have complete trust in my country’s police …” he began by saying, before laughing out loud, as if he had just made an excellent joke. ― Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory #BookSky

“You judge very properly,” said Mr. Bennet, “and it is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?” ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice #BookSky

“You show me a member of Congress who’s part of the appropriations process and I’ll show you a wife, child, or brother-in-law with a company that benefits from federal dollars.” ― Jack Carr, The Terminal List #BookSky

“Well, imagine if we only ever did what we were supposed to,” ― Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club #BookSky

“When a baby falls asleep in your arms you are absolved. The purest creature alive has chosen you. There’s nothing else.” ― Louise Erdrich, The Sentence #BookSky

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ― Blaise Pascal, Pensées #BookSky

“There is a certain kind of child who awakens from a book as from an abyssal sleep, swimming heavily up through layers of consciousness toward a reality that seems less real than the dream-state that has been left behind. I was such a child.” ― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris #BookSky

“She is no more than thirty pounds; no more than three feet tall; her entire bag of belongings could fit in a single drawer; she rarely speaks unless spoken to; and her heart beats no louder than a bird’s. So how is it possible that she takes up so much space?!” ― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“Do you see these stones in this bare, scorching desert? Turn them into BREAD and mankind will run after you like sheep, grateful and obedient . . . .

“I don’t simply want to learn the languages. I want to understand those who speak them.” ― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow #BookSky #LangSky

“Tell me, why did you shoot the fellow? Wasn’t he an aristocrat like yourself?” The Count showed an expression of mild shock. “I shot him because he was an aristocrat.”

“Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence--one that was on intimate terms with a comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard.” ― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow #BookSky

“We’ve been safe so long, and grown so rich, that we’ve forgotten what we owe it to. But there’s no excuse for those blockheads of statesmen, as they call themselves, who are paid to see things as they are.” ― Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands #BookSky

“the ideal of equality is not the empirical dogma that all human groups are indistinguishable but a moral commitment to treat people as individuals and not prejudge or mistreat them based on their membership in a group.” ― Steven Pinker, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows #BookSky

“An intimacy of strangers. That’s a phrase I’ve sometimes used to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading, that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader.” ― Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder #BookSky

“the repression of controversial ideas is no longer a hallmark of theocracies and dictatorships but increasingly a fixture of universities, the very institutions most committed to exploring ideas.” ― Steven Pinker, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows #BookSky

“A bit of laughter can be the bridge that lets you cross out of a bad time, believe you me.” ― John Langan, The Fisherman #BookSky