Ayana Toal

“...What is the use of beauty? i have lived my life surrounded by painters, and still I do not know the answer. But i suspect, some days, that beauty helps protect the spirit of mankind, swaddle it and succor it, so that we might survive. Beauty is no end in itself, but if it makes or lives less miserable so that we might be more kind-well, then, lets have beauty, painted on our porcelain, hanging on our walls, ringing through our stories.”
― Gregory Maguire, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

“Making the present seem inevitable robs history of all its life and much of its meaning.”
― James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

“Legends were mostly bullshit, even his own, but they sometimes could be useful.”
― William Kely McClung, Black Fire

“Ngo Diem was heard to say, “I want a repressive machine controlling the whole of the country of South Vietnam from Saigon to the remotest villages. You shall apply massacres, torture, deportations, and mass imprisonment while conducting constant raids. You shall make the population so fearful of this government that no-one shall ever dare to become a revolutionary or any other kind of outlaw!”

(A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)”
― Michael G. Kramer