Rick

“Readers may be divided into four classes: I. Sponges, who absorb all they read, and return it nearly in the same state, only a little dirtied. II. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing, and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. III. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. IV. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes and Lectures upon Shakespeare and Some of the Old Poets and Dramatists: With Other Literary Remains of S. T. Coleridge. Volume 1

“War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”
― Don DeLillo, Don DeLillo's White Noise

“It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson