Mark

“In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“[Europeans lived] in dense, settled populations- cities- where human & animal waste breeds vermin, like mice and rats and roaches. Most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, though, didn't live in dense settlements, and even those who lived in villages tended to move with the seasons, taking apart their towns and rebuilding them somewhere else. They didn't accumulate filth, and they didn't live crowds. They suffered from very few infectious diseases.”
― Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States

“...I would train myself to make my work so mechanical that I could concentrate much of my energy on listening and watching. My knowledge, I believed, would still the voices of despair inside me.”
― Robert Parker, Capitol Hill in Black and White

“For the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the suspension of their own mores when they came in contact with the Indian nations was quite the opposite of battle, bringing not horrors, but the guiltless pleasure of a liaison unlike any in the United States- unlike any, because it didn't have to be arranged, induced, concealed, limited, remunerated, or sanctified.”
― Julie M. Fenster, Jefferson's America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed a Nation