“Throughout history, all dictators, tyrants, and oppressors, whatever their ideology – whether Aryan, African, Asian, Arab, Slav, or any other racial background; whether defenders of popular revolutions, or the privileges of the upper classes, or God’s mandate or martial law – have had one thing in common: the vicious persecution of the written word. Books are extremely dangerous, they make people think.”
– A. Iturbe, “the Librarian of Auschwitz”

“What a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others.”
– T. Westover, “Educated”

“It was so characteristically Japanese, the way lives were made more tolerable by gathering loose desert stones and forming with them something enduringly human. These rock gardens had outlived the barracks and the towers and would surely outlive the asphalt road and rusted pipes and shattered slabs of concrete. Each stone was a mouth, speaking for a family, for some man who had beautified his doorstep.”
– J.W. Houston, “Farewell to Manzanar”