Katia N

“In the U.S. election of 1860, the New York Herald's owner James Gordon Bennett Sr. warned the white workers of New York, "... if Lincoln is elected, you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.”
― Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together

“Le vrai pessimiste sait qu'il est déjà trop tard pour l'être.”
― Hervé Le Tellier, L'Anomalie

“All historical writing that is not aware that the actions and plots related do not coincide with past reality is potentially the bearer of a mythological dimension. It may well be a serious narrative full of references and quotations, distinguished by its “exactness” and abstaining from any polemic, yet it remains nonetheless that that belief of the author, whether naive or not, associates him or her with many propagators of myth history who continue to swell the tanks of discipline today.

A living myth is not a lie; it is a story about the past or the future whose veracity cannot be established in a rational manner, yet that no-one can imagine rejecting. It remains valid, in the eyes of believers, until heretics succeed in refuting it. Even in this case, however, the belief is not necessary shaken; myths in fact tend to preserve themselves as long as they are needed, or else until other myths come along to replace them. In history all societies need myths to ensure their coherence and preserve their collective identity, in particular, that of elites that revolve around the sovereign power.”
― Shlomo Sand, Twilight of History

“People are the same all over the world, I imagine, people who react like that to their countries conspiracies: turning them into tales that are told, like children’s fables, and also into place in the memory or the imagination, a place where we go as tourists, to revive nostalgia or to try to find something we’ve lost.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins