Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, #3)

by Ken Follett

Marriage is a promise. You can’t keep a promise only when it suits you. You have to keep it against your inclination. That’s what it means.”

A white American can orbit the earth, but a black American can’t enter a restroom.

A man hates the person he has wronged, paradoxically. I think it’s because the victim is a perpetual reminder that he behaved shamefully.”

“Our great stumbling block, in our stride toward freedom, is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner. It’s the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who constantly says, like Bobby Kennedy: ‘I agree with the goal you seek, but I cannot condone your methods.’ He paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

“We will have to repent, in this generation, not merely for the hateful words and actions of bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good,” King

“That my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character—I have a dream today.

“Call no man happy until he is dead,” said the playwright Aeschylus: Dimka had heard that quote at university and always remembered it. Youthful promise could be blighted by later tragedy; suffering was often rewarded by wisdom.

‘All men make mistakes,’ said the ancient Greek Sophocles. ‘But a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride.’”