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And then there were the slavers. If you were born post-Break in some part of the world that still had schooling, you probably heard the story of slavery. Centuries of human subjugation, finally ended when the great wartime president, Abraham Lincoln, rode down out of the clouds on his red, white, and blue Pegasus, and set the land’s slaveowners on fire with a single, terrible match, declaring the country that was then the United States of America to be a free land for everyone. It was a great day for everyone but the slave owners. And the turkeys, I guess. Apparently, there was some sort of feast afterwards, and that was how Thanksgiving had gotten started. A yearly reminder that we were all free, regardless of the color of our skin or the content of our character. And then Dr. Nowhere went and broke the world. After that, strong men and women took over and did what assholes in power too often do.

— One Tin Solder by Chris Tullbane (The Murder of Crows, #3) (Page 61 - 62)

For those of you who were born post-Break, baseball was an archaic sport from Dr. Nowhere’s time, involving three teams armed with bats, each trying to capture the other teams’ bases. In the absence of Healers, the only thing preventing mass casualties was the ‘three strikes’ rule, which defined a limit on how many times a given player could be hit. I’m still not sure how balls figured into the whole thing, but given that my own testicles want to crawl up into my body just thinking about it, I’m okay with remaining ignorant.

— See These Bones by Chris Tullbane (The Murder of Crows, #1) (Page 255 - 256)

On June 26, 2001, the beginning of the New Zealand winter, five helicopters and two ships loaded with 210 drums of helicopter fuel and 132 tons of rat bait left Invercargill, at the southern terminus of New Zealand, heading for the Southern Ocean. By the second week of July, McClelland and company had dropped their first load of brodifacoum on Campbell. Ten days and two hundred thousand dead and dying rats later, they dropped their last. In the following years the crews returned to find no evidence of survivors.

— Rat Island by William Stolzenburg (Page 173)

Throughout these stages, Hanski was drawn to the study of small patches of island-like habitat. At first those patches were dung piles. For a beetle, a pile of dung is an island that must be discovered and, very rapidly, colonized. Hanski used his own feces or dead fish as bait for the beetles. He attracted and trapped them while hiking up and down Mount Mulu in Borneo to understand the general rules governing when numerous species compete for a pile of shit and when few do.

— Never Home Alone by Rob R. Dunn (Page 57 - 58)

As ecologists, we learn that any particular species isn’t good or bad, nor of greater or lesser intrinsic value than any other—they simply exist. Except in the light of our own beliefs and wants, a blue whale has no more value than does the tapeworm in the blue whale or the bacterium in the tapeworm or the virus in the bacterium. They exist simply because they evolved.

— Never Home Alone by Rob R. Dunn (Page 144)

Sitting squat in the middle of the endless miles of open grassland and tree-lined streambeds that the baboons frequented for food each day was the great Impenetrable Thicket. It stretched for miles along a ridge top, thick scrub and endless thorn bushes, deep aardvark holes and jagged volcanic rock, teeming with animals you wouldn’t want to meet. The previous grad students told me that the baboons couldn’t be followed there. I tried once on foot and had nearly been flattened by a rhino. Then I tried by vehicle, promptly punctured two tires, nearly snapped an axle, and then came close to being flattened by a rhino. So I gave up. Inventing the wheel was what one of the grad students claimed the baboons must be up to when they thicketed us.

— Primate's Memoir by Robert M. Sapolsky (Page 65)