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The only intelligent species in the Galactic Community that considers displaying the teeth to be an expression of friendly intentions is Homo sapiens. Must be because we don't have sixty or seventy canines, like the Laggorus, or a series of flexible chewing plates that bear a distant resemblance to the coronal cilia of our rotifers or the cylindrical millstones of our ancient mills, like the Cetians.

— Super extra grande by Yoss (Page 79)

Here [in the United States] urban dereliction has become the moral and natural historical equivalent of war. In 1940-41, the Heinkel and Junkers bombers of the Luftwaffe destroyed 350,000 dwellings [sic] units and unhoused a million Londoners. In the 1970s, an equally savage "blitz" of landlord disinvestment, bank redlining, and federal "benign neglect" led to the destruction of 294,000 housing units in New York City alone.

— Dead Cities by Mike Davis (Page 386)

When I dumbly asked Ricky what color the cop who hit him was, he looked right through me. "He was Latino, and that is neither more nor less important than the fact that the cop who beat Soltero was black. Thing you got to understand, partner, is that all cops are colored blue."

— Dead Cities by Mike Davis (Page 278)

From Crete and Cornwall to Montana and Hawai'i, the gentrification of wild places (like that of urban centers) is always a theft of tradition, an uprooting of community. Eventually all the world's ruggedly beautiful landscapes of toil and struggle seem destined to be repackaged as "heritage," wrenched from unemployed locals and sold off to scenery-loving burghers fleeing the cities.

— Dead Cities by Mike Davis (Page 116)

Experiments show that when two genetically identical seeds are put in identical settings, each one grows very differently; each one is a self, committed to its ongoing existence in a particular body embedded in, and interpreting, a particular place. ...

Art was thought to define humanity. Tolstoy saw it as the fundamental human activity... But for 50 million years, eons before humans first painted rocks, the bower bird had ground pigment from fruit seeds, painting bowers, and erecting maypole-like structures for mating dances.

— We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself by Isabelle Fremeaux, Jay Jordan (Page 121 - 127)

Pierre... felt that the sound of his words, regardless of the thought they contained, would be heard less than the sound of the animated nobleman's words. ... Pierre not only had not succeeded in speaking, he had been rudely interrupted, pushed aside, turned away from as a common enemy. This had happened not because they were displeased with the meaning of what he said—that had been forgotten, after the great number of speeches that followed it—but because, for inspiration, a crowd needs to have a tangible object of love and a tangible object of hatred. Pierre had become the latter.

— War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky (Page 679)

The willingness or unwillingness of one French corporal to enlist for a second tour of duty appears to us as good a cause [of the Russo-French war of 1812] as Napoleon's refusal to withdraw his army beyond the Vistula and give back the duchy of Oldenburg; for if he had been unwilling to serve, and another had been unwilling, and a third, and a thousandth corporal and soldier, there would have been so many less men in Napoleon's army, and there could have been no war.

— War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky (Page 604)