bookgleanings

[bookgleanings]

The Marvels #1

Written by Kurt Busiek

Art by Yildiray Cinar & Richard Isanove

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Unwritten #47 written by Mike Carey art by Peter Gross

#Unwritten #Mike Carey #Peter Gross

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It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

#A Christmas Carol #Charles Dickens #laughter #good humor

[bookgleanings]

Death is not a supernatural event; it is an event of the most materialistic character, and may certainly be postponed, by the united efforts of the human race, to a period far more distant from the date of birth than has been the case during the historic period. The question has often been debated in my mind whether death is or is not wholly preventible; whether, if the entire human race were united in their efforts to eliminate causes of decay, death might not also be altogether eliminated.

The Story of My Heart: An Autobiography by Richard Jefferies

#Richard Jefferies #The Story of My Heart

[bookgleanings]

We all love mysteries in books and hate them in life.

“The Man Who Was Present” in The Uncertainty Principle by Dmitri Bilenkin

#Dmitri Bilenkin #The Uncertainty Principle

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“The good of the community takes priority over that of the individual.”

Adolph Hitler in Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews 

by Richard Breiting and Edouard Calic

(also published as Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931)

#Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931 #Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews #adolph hitler #Richard Breiting #Edouard Calic

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Majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong.

Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes

#Thomas Hughes #Tom Brown's School Days

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What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

#Joseph Heller #Catch-22

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“Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am.”

Luna Lovegood in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling

#J. K. Rowling #Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

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Champions #2 Marvel Comics (2012) written by Eve L. Ewing art by Simone Di Meo, Bob Quinn, and  Federico Blee

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How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and are ordered by a humane intelligence! It is the most utter falsehood and a crime against the human race.

The Story of My Heart: An Autobiography by Richard Jefferies

#Richard Jefferies #The Story of My Heart

[bookgleanings]

The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.

As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn

#As We Go Marching #John T. Flynn

[bookgleanings]

Spider-Verse #2 written by Ryan North art by Pere Perez

#Pere Perez #Ryan North #Spider-Verse

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War is Hell #14 Script: Chris Claremont Pencils and Inks: George Evans

reprinted in: We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust Craig Yoe (Editor)

#George Evans #Chris Claremont #War is Hell #We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust

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“I like people who see life with eyes different from everyone else’s, who think about things in a way that’s different from most people….Maybe it’s because I’ve always lived with people who are too normal and satisfied with themselves….I’m sure my mother and brothers are certain of their indisputable usefulness in this world, and know at every moment what they want, what they think is bad, and what they think is good….And have suffered very little anguish over anything.”

Ena in Nada by Carmen Laforet translated by Edith Grossman

#Edith Grossman #Carmen Laforet #Nada

[bookgleanings]

I’ve always resented the word maturity, primarily, I think, because it is most often used as a club. If you do something that someone doesn’t like, you lack maturity, regardless of the actual merits of your action. Too, it seems to me that what is most often called maturity is nothing more than disengagement from life. If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn’t, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those “mature” people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. This has never appealed to me.

Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin

#Rite of Passage #Alexei Panshin

[bookgleanings]

In 1938, when the federal government first considered aid for interstate highways … Secretary of Agriculture (and subsequent Vice President) Henry Wallace proposed to President Roosevelt that highways routed through cities could also accomplish ‘the elimination of unsightly and unsanitary districts.” Over the next two decades, the linkage between highway construction and the removal of African Americans was a frequent theme of those who stood to profit from a federal road-building program. They found that an effective way to argue a case for highway spending was to stress the capacity of road construction to make business districts and their environs white. Mayors and other urban political leaders joined in, seizing on highway construction as a way to overcome the constitutional prohibition on zoning African Americans away from white neighborhoods near downtown.

In 1943, the American Concrete Institute urged the construction of urban expressways for “the elimination of slums and blighted areas.” In 1949, the American Road Builders Association wrote to President Truman that if interstates were properly routed through metropolitan areas, they could “contribute in a substantial manner to the elimination of slum and deteriorated areas.” An important influence on national legislation and administration of the highway system was the Urban Land Institute, whose 1957 newsletter recommended that city governments survey the “extent to which blighted areas may provide suitable highway routes.” By 1962 the Highway Research Board boasted that interstate highways were “eating out slums” and “reclaiming blighted areas.”

Alfred Johnson, the executive director of the American Association of State Highway Officials, was the lobbyist most deeply involved with the congressional committee that wrote the 1956 Highway Act. He later recalled that “some city officials expressed the view in the mod-1950s that the urban Interstates would give them a good opportunity to get rid of the local ‘niggertown.’” His expectation did not go unfulfilled.

Hamtramck, Michigan, for example, was an overwhelmingly Polish enclave surrounded by Detroit. The city’s 1959 master plan called for a “program of population loss,” understood to refer to its small number of African American residents. In 1962, with federal urban renewal funds, the city began to demolish African American neighborhoods. The first project cleared land for expansion of a Chrysler automobile manufacturing plant. Then, federal dollars were used to raze more homes to make way for the Chrysler Expressway (I-75) leading to the plant. In advance, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had warned that the expressway would displace about 4,000 families, 87 percent of whom were African American.

Twelve years later, a federal appeals court concluded that HUD officials knew that the highway would disproportionately destroy African American homes and make no provision for finding them new lodgings.

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

#Richard Rothstein #The Color of Law