“While levels of freedom have receded even in some of the most entrenched parliamentary democracies. Eternal vigilance, as the saying goes, is the price of liberty, as power can easily be stolen.
Vigilance, however, is not the same as gloom. Even a modicum of historical perspective indicates that today dictatorship is on the decline when compared to the twentieth century.”
Frank Dikötter
“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.”
Hans Christian Andersen
“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson