Eric

“10 / Sgoráya négoy i toskóy : Both nouns belong to the vaguely evocative type of romantic locution so frequent in Eugene Onegin and so difficult to render by exact English words. Nega ranges from “mollitude” (Fr. mollesse) , i.e., soft luxuriance, “dulcitude,” through various shades of amorous pensiveness, douce paresse, and sensual tenderness to outright voluptuousness (Fr. volupté). The translator has to be careful here not to overdo in English what Pushkin is on the point of doing in the Russian when he makes his maiden burn with all the French languors of flesh and fancy.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Eugene Onegin, Vol. II

“[Northerners] took over the Southern myth and themselves began to revel in it. This acceptance was to culminate in Gone With the Wind, the enormous success of which novel makes a curious counterbalance to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. But it began in the Century of the eighties with the stories of Thomas Nelson Page. Though Page had been only twelve at the end of the Civil War, so had had little experience of the old regime, he really invented for the popular mind Old Massa and Mistis and Meh Lady, with their dusky-skinned adoring retainers. The Northerners, after the shedding of so much blood, illogically found it soothing to be told that slavery had not been so bad, that the Negroes were a lovable but simple race, whose business was to work for whites. And Page also struck in his stories a note of reconciliation that everybody wanted to hear: he cooked up romances between young Northern officers, as gentlemanly as any Southerner, and spirited plantation beauties who might turn out to be the young men's cousins and who in any case would marry them after the war.”
― Edmund Wilson

“The ironist is ironical not because he does not care, but because he cares too much.”
― Randolph Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918

“The Americans of the United States do not let their dogs hunt the Indians as do the Spaniards in Mexico, but at bottom it is the same pitiless feeling which here, as everywhere else, animates the European race. This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die. Besides I do not want to get mixed up in it. I will not do anything against them: I will limit myself to providing everything that will hasten their ruin. In time I will have their lands and will be innocent of their death.

Satisfied with his reasoning, the American goes to church where he hears the minister of the gospel repeat every day that all men are brothers, and that the Eternal Being who has made them all in like image, has given them all the duty to help one another.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville