24
" He took the woman from her bed, pretending not to notice the question posed in his mind: Why do you always experiment on women? He didn't care to admit that the inference had any validity. She just happened to be the first one he's come across, that was all. What about the man in the living room, though? For God's sake! he flared back. I'm not going to rape the woman!
Crossing your fingers, Neville? Knocking on wood?
He ignored that, beginning to suspect his mind of harboring an alien. Once he might have termed it conscience. Now it was only an annoyance. Morality, after all, had fallen with society. He was his own ethic.
Makes a good excuse, doesn't it, Neville? Oh, shut up. "
― Richard Matheson , I Am Legend
26
" The very word " secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings...Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe...no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of " clear and present danger," then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent...For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. "
33
" Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her spectacles and the book. It was Black Beauty. Grandmama kept no modern children's books, and this made common ground for the three of them. She read the terrible chapter where the stable lad lets Beauty get overheated and gives him a cold drink and does not put on his blanket. The story was suited to the day. Even Roger listened entranced. And Deborah, watching her grandmother's calm face and hearing her careful voice reading the sentences, thought how strange it was that Grandmama could turn herself into Beauty with such ease. She was a horse, suffering there with pneumonia in the stable, being saved by the wise coachman.After the reading, cricket was anticlimax, but Deborah must keep her bargain. She kept thinking of Black Beauty writing the book. It showed how good the story was, Grandmama said, because no child had ever yet questioned the practical side of it, or posed the picture of a horse with a pen in its hoof." A modern horse would have a typewriter," thought Deborah, and she began to bowl to Roger, smiling to herself as she did so because of the twentieth-century Beauty clacking with both hoofs at a machine. (" The Pool" ) "
39
" Throughout the history of the Kensington Rune Stone in the twentieth
century, memories of an ancient battle were repeatedly evoked to
address the concerns about more recent battles. The skræling endured
as a convenient symbol of the threats posed by secularization, urbanization,
and diversification. As sociologist Richard K. Fenn observes,
“Any society is a reservoir of old longings and ancient hatreds. These
need to be understood, addressed, resolved and transcended if a society
is to have a future that is different from its past.” Furthermore, when
a society does not adequately confront its past, it perpetually finds “a
new target that resembles but also differs from the source of original
conflict.” If Fenn is correct, old enemies will continue to emerge in
the face of new enemies unless Minnesotans can understand, address,
resolve, and transcend the state’s original sin: the unjust treatment of
the region’s first inhabitants. "
― David M. Krueger , Myths of the Rune Stone: Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America
