Julia

“After the 1938 Munich Conference, every book in the Czech language that dealt with geography, biography, or history was confiscated and either burned or mashed into pulp. In Vilnius, Lithuania, the library in the Jewish ghetto was set on fire. A few months later the residents of the ghetto were shipped to concentration camps and gassed, illustrating the truth in German poet Heinrich Heine's warning: "There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Moreover, no public woman resides inside the city, but all such abide outside in the suburbs. And 'tis wonderful what a vast number of these are for the foreigners; ...”
― Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo: The Venetian

“The inhabitants are all Idolaters. And I may as well remind you again [implied sigh?] that all the people of Cathay are Idolaters.”
― Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo: The Venetian

“If it be questioned how the population of the country can supply sufficient numbers of these duties, and by what means they can be supported, we may answer, that all the idolaters, and likewise the Saracens, keep six, eight, or ten women, according to their circumstances, by whom they have a prodigious number of children. Some of them have as many as thirty sons capable of following their fathers in arms; whereas with us a man has only one wife, and even although she should prove barren, he is obliged to pass his life with her, and is by that means deprived of the chance of raising a family. Hence it is that our population is so much inferior to theirs.”
― Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo: The Venetian