From one village to the next you change language

That's in Russia! I had to look it up in an atlas. Not far from the Baltic Sea. There are several small countries in those parts: Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia ... With Poland and Russia surrounding them. The national borders don't match ethnic boundaries. From one village to the next you change language. And on top of that you've got Jews spread all over, constituting a separate race. And besides that, there are the communists!

G. Simenon, Pietr the Latvian (1930) tr. D. Bellos (2013), 129

The dream is over. It's just the same, only I'm thirty, and a lot of people have got long hair

I don't know about the "history"; the people who are in control and in power, and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeoisie is exactly the same, except there is a lot of fag middle class kids with long, long hair walking around London in trendy clothes, and Kenneth Tynan is making a fortune out of the word "fuck." Apart from that, nothing happened. We all dressed up, the same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin' everything. It is exactly the same.

We've grown up a little, all of us, there has been a change and we're all a bit freer and all that, but it's the same game. Shit, they're doing exactly the same thing, selling arms to South Africa, killing blacks on the street, people are living in fucking poverty, with rats crawling over them. It just makes you puke, and I woke up to that too.

The dream is over. It's just the same, only I'm thirty, and a lot of people have got long hair. That's what it is, man, nothing happened except that we grew up, we did our thing – just like they were telling us. You kids – most of the so called "now generation" are getting a job. We're a minority, you know, people like us always were, but maybe we are a slightly larger minority because of maybe something or other.

John Lennon, Interview with J.S. Wenner, Rolling Stone (Feb 4 1971), quoted in D. Sandbrook, Never had it so good (2005), xxiii. 

I must render an account to a Lord who in his goodness does not count in farthings

Over the next two weeks he grew progressively worse. During one of his visits, Bernini's nephew, an Oratorian priest, Father Filippo (Domenico says Francesco) Marchese, asked him about the state of his soul and whether he was afraid to die. Baldinucci indicates that Bernini replied, "Father, I must render an account to a Lord who in his goodness does not count in farthings."

Gianlorenzo Bernini, cited in J. Morrissey, The genius in the design (2005), 266-7

To Europe Byzantium is a symbol of its honour

The realm of the last Roman Emperor is only the size of a plate, merely a gigantic circular wall surrounding churches, the palace and a tangle of houses, all of them known as Byzantium. Pitilessly plundered by the crusaders, depopulated by the plague, exhausted by constantly defending itself from nomadic people, torn by national and religious quarrels, the city cannot summon up men or courage to resist, of its own accord, an enemy that has been holding it clasped in its tentacles for so long. The purple of the last emperor of Byzantium, Constantine Dragases, is a cloak made of wind, his crown a toy of fate. But for the very reason that it is already surrounded by the Turks, and is sacrosanct to all the lands of the western world because they have jointly shared its culture, to Europe Byzantium is a symbol of its honour.

S. Zweig,'The conquest of Byzantium' (1940), tr. A.Bell, in Triumph and Disaster: Five historical miniatures (2016), 69-70

Men like Scott have featured hundreds of times in British history

Men like Scott have featured hundreds of times in British history, conquering India and nameless islands in the East Indian archipelago, colonizing Africa and fighting battles against the whole world, always with the same iron energy, the same collective consciousness and the same cold, reserved expression.

S. Zweig,'The Race to reach the South pole' (1927), tr. A.Bell, in Triumph and Disaster: Five historical miniatures (2016), 40

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.

J. Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel (1997), 197