Sidney

“The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course— its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick: or, the White Whale

“There are three great taboos in textbook publishing,” an editor at one of the biggest houses told me, “sex, religion, and social class.” While I had been able to guess the first two, the third floored me. Sociologists know the importance of social class, after all. Reviewing American history textbooks convinced me that this editor was right, however. The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has “the power to rise in the world,” is anathema to textbook authors, and to many teachers as well.”
― James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“least forty-three organized boy gangs treaded Richmond’s landscape, twelve of them from Southside (across the river at Manchester): Gamble’s Hill Cats, Grace Street Cats, Oregon Hill Cats (also Terribles), Sidney Cats, Harveytown Cats, First, Second, and Third Street Cats, Tenth Street Gang, Fourth Street Horribles, Fifth Street Gang, Shockoe Hill Gang, Butchertown Gang, Rocketts Gang, Church Hill Gang, Union Hill Gang, Old Market Gang, Gully Nation Gang, Sheep Hill Gang, Brook Road Gang, Hobo Gang, Lulu Gang, Clyde Row Gang, Park Sparrows Gang, Bumtown Gang, Basin Bank Cats, Twenty-Seventh Street Gang, Thirtieth Street Gang, Grace Street Gang, West End Gang, and Male Orphan Asylum Cats; from Manchester—Terrapin Hill Cats, Baconsville Cats, Goat Hill Cats, Battery Cats, Diamond Hill Cats, Swampoodle Cats, Hull Street Cats, Decatur Street Cats, Oak Grove Cats, Marx’s Field Cats, Belle Isle Cats, and Swansboro Gang.”
― Harry M. Ward, Children of the Streets of Richmond, 1865-1920

“If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”
― Flannery O'Connor