"A North Korean maritime official was on a boat on the Yellow Sea in the mid-1990s when the radio accidentally picked up a South Korean broadcast. The program was a situation comedy that featured two young women fighting over a parking space at an apartment complex. He couldn’t grasp the concept of a place with so many cars that there was no room to park them. Although he was in his late thirties and fairly high-ranking, he had never known anyone who owned a private car—and certainly not young women. He assumed the radio program was a parody, but after a few days of mulling it over, it struck him that yes, there must be that many cars in South Korea. He defected a few years later."

Barbara Demick. Nothing to Envy, p. 215.

"‘I can’t talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of ny unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.’"

From The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, p. 260.

"Finally, he said, ‘I could look at this all day, but we should go back to the hotel.’ ‘Do we have time?’ I asked. He smiled sadly. ‘If only,’ he said."

John Green. The Fault in Our Stars, p. 211.

"Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin."

John Green. The Fault in Our Stars, p. 157.

"Without a knowledge formation in younger years, adults function as more or less partial citizens. Reading and knowledge have to enter their leisure lives, at their own initiative. Analyzing Pew Research data from 2002 and 2004, political scientists Stephen and Linda Bennett lay out the simple fact: ‘People who read books for pleasure are more likely than non-readers to report voting, being registered to vote, “always” voting, to pay greater attention to news stories about national, international, and local politics, and to be better informed.’"

Mark Bauerlein. The Dumbest Generation, p. 202.

"Writing at a time when divorce was permitted only in cases of adultery, he took the radical position of emphasizing spiritual compatibility. If a man and woman did not get along, Milton argued, then their relationship undermined God’s reason for creating matrimony. A marriage between two incompatible people was not, according to Milton, a marriage at all."

Stephen B. Dobranski. “Milton’s social life.” The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson, pp. 11-12.

"[T]his division of basic facts from higher-order thinking runs against common sense. How middle schoolers may apprehend “historical thinking” without learning about Napoleon, the Renaissance, slavery… in a word, without delving into the factual details of another time and place far from their own, is a mystery. Newpaper reporters realize better than professors the simple truth. If you don’t know which rights are enumerated in the First Amendment, you can’t do very much ‘critical thinking’ about rights in the United States. If you don’t know which countries border Israel, you can’t ascertain the grounds of the Middle East conflict. Such facts are not an end in themselves, to be sure, but they are an indispensable starting point for deeper insight, and the ignorance of them is a fair gauge of deeper deficiencies."

Mark Bauerlein. The Dumbest Generation.

"Think of how many things you must do in order not to know the year 1776 or the British prime minister or the Fifth Amendment. At the start, you must forget the lessons of school—history class, social studies, government, geography, English, philosophy, and art history. You must care nothing about the current events, elections, foreign policy, and war. No newspapers, no political magazines, no NPR or Rush Limbaugh, no CNN, Fox News, network news, or NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. No books on the Cold War or the Founding, no biographies, nothing on Bush or Hillary, terrorism or religion, Europe or the Middle East. No political activity and no community activism. And your friends must act the same way, never letting a historical fact or current affair slip into a cell phone exchange."

Mark Bauerlein. The Dumbest Generation.