Quotes & Highlights

The Soviet regime manufactured a famine in Ukraine that would kill 3.9 million people, a tragedy of unimaginable scope that’s known today as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “hunger” and “extermination.”
— Andy Greenberg, Sandworm
“blue team” defense and “red team” attack.
— Andy Greenberg, Sandworm
Phobos means fear. In myth, he was the offspring of Aphrodite and Ares, the child of love and war.
— Pierce Brown, Morning Star
“I wonder when you started believing grit and vision were the same thing.”
— Pierce Brown, Morning Star
In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.
— Pierce Brown, Morning Star
One of the scientists responsible for sequencing the human genome, Craig Venter, was even more frank with reporters. “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis,” Venter said. His research team at Celera Genomics had determined “the genetic code” of five individuals, who were identified as either “Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or African American,” and the scientists could not tell one race from another.
— Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
Cosby envisioned the ultimate uplift suasion show about a stereotype-defying family uplifted by their own striving beyond the confines of discriminated Blackness. He believed he was showing African Americans what was possible if they worked hard enough and stopped their antiracist activism. Cosby and his millions of loyal viewers actually believed that The Cosby Show and its spinoffs were persuading away the racist ideas of its millions of White viewers.
— Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
The percentage of children born to single Black women had risen from 21 percent in 1960 to 55 percent in 1985, Davis said. Black teenager birthrates could not explain this increase (those figures had remained virtually unchanged from 1920 to 1990). Davis explained that the “disproportionate number of births to unmarried teenagers” had been caused by the fact that older, married Black women had started having fewer children in the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, it was the overall percentage of babies born to young and single Black mothers as opposed to married mothers—not the sheer number of babies born to single Black mothers—that dramatically rose.
— Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
One study, for example, based on the National Longitudinal Youth Survey data collected from 1976 to 1989, found that young Black males were far more likely than young White males to engage in serious violent crime. But when the researchers compared only employed young males, the racial differences in violent behavior disappeared. Certain violent crime rates were higher in Black neighborhoods simply because unemployed people were concentrated in Black neighborhoods.
— Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning
In 1996, when two-thirds of the crack users were White or Latina/o, 84.5 percent of the defendants convicted of crack possession were Black.
— Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning