Jerusalem

by Alan Moore

you had a population that were miserable and restless because they had nowhere bearable to live, then the preferred solution seemed not to be spending money on improving their condition but on hiring more police in case things should turn ugly, housing these new myrmidons in properties from which the itchy and disgruntled man-herds were already serendipitously purged.

One in five mothers died in childbirth still, and May grew faint to think how many times these agonising straits had been the last of life that countless women ever knew. To pass from this delirium to death, knowing the babe you’d carried for so long would in all likelihood be joining you, knowing your family’s lineage was crushed to nothing in the hard gears of the world, that bloody millstone grinding till time’s end.

from seeing them as people who had problems to problems themselves, problems of cost and mathematics

there are MPs and leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay. There are none who are poor. There never have been, and there never will be.

in the prejudice league tables, class beats race.

Places don’t stay where you left them. You go back there, anywhere, and even if it looks exactly how it did before, it’s somewhere else.