“In my first video diary I explained my love for women who have a taste in carrots. Since then, I have received plenty of carrots. Now I also have a keen interest in women who like Lamborghinis.””

“Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our constitution; we stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us.””

A Christmas Sermon

“When you’re not used to comfort and good things to eat, you’re intoxicated by them in no time. Truth’s only too pleased to leave you. Very little’s ever needed for Truth to let go of you. And after all, you’re not really very keen to keep hold of it.””

“He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of the red tincture and added one of the powders. The mixture, which was at first of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour. Suddenly and at the same moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound changed to a dark purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green. My visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and looked upon me with an air of scrutiny."And now," said he, "to settle what remains. Will you be wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and to go forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan.””

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Let’s see St. Louis.” “One of the most colorful sections of town is right here at the waterfront,” Julie Anne said. “We can ride a little old-fashioned trolley car. It will take us to a number of interesting places including the arch and the old-time paddle wheel steamers at the foot of the levee.” “That sounds like fun,” Nancy said eagerly. “Let’s try the arch first.” At the next corner the girls boarded a yellow streetcar which clanged its bell and rode off slowly and smoothly toward the huge arch in the waterfront park. They got out with several other tourists and followed them across a concrete walk. Then they went down a ramp toward the entrance into one leg of the huge span.””

The Message in the Hollow Oak

“It is difficult to imagine any act more revolutionary than the redistribution of land from the planters to the slaves in the former Confederacy. By the fall of 1865, Andrew Johnson, keenly aware of the fundamental transformation this would cause in the structure of the economy in the South and in the relations between black and white, reversed any plans for land redistribution. Only former slaves who had paid for their land were allowed to remain on it. Rumors of “forty acres and a mule” for all freed slaves proved unfounded. Still, African Americans continued to make land ownership a priority. As the freedman Bayley Wyat (also spelled Wyatt) put it succinctly in his “Freedman’s Speech,” delivered in 1866: “We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land.””

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

Quotes by Louis Keene