Why do my eyes hurt?

- You've never used them before.

Nationalism

Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality, for better or worse, and in general an inescapable one.

- Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism

Religion

It appears that they are anxious to pass on their religion to all races of men, but keep very little of it themselves. I have not yet seen the meek inherit the earth, or the peacemakers receive high honor. 

- Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, Santee Sioux physician

But the past, as it has been said, is a foreign land.  It is in the spirit of understanding the distance we have come over the years that we remember – remember the day, and the days that followed, when we were first pulled, blinking and confused and very much against our wills, across the border into the lives we now know.

The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide.  There may not be – I believe that there is not – resurrection after death, but nothing could prove more conclusively than my own brief but eventful history the fact that resurrection is possible within our limited span of earthly time.