On Valentine's Day of 1884, just 36 hours after the birth of their only daughter, Alice, 25-year-old future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt held his young wife in his arms as she passed away from undiagnosed Bright's disease. Incredibly, just hours before, in the same house, he had already said a final goodbye to his mother, Martha. She had succumbed to Typhoid, aged just 48.

Theodore's diary for that day read as follows.

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

- Jack Kerouac

Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness.

— Gustave Le Bon

"Don't even listen to a historian if he or she doesn't have a point of view. None of us are blank slates. None of us can just 'tell it how it was.'"

David Blight, in the introduction to the Yale Civil War Course

Erika Szeles. She was born in 1941. She lived in the 13th district of Budapest with her mother, who raised her daughter by her own after her husband died in the Second World War. Erika studied to become a cook, she worked at hotel “Béke szálló” when the revolution broke out. She was inspired by her boyfriend to join a group of Hungarian freedom-fighters and worked as a Red Cross nurse to help the injured. Erika was shot in her neck by a Soviet soldier on 7th of November 1956, when the revolution was already suppressed.

Jan Bogaerts - Evening twilight in Mategna near Merano

The only advice that I'm in the mood to give - and that I give regularly - to young people is this: fight for what you believe in. You will lose, just like I have lost, all the battles. But only one you may win. The one that you engage every morning, in front of the mirror.

— Indro Montanelli

Eric Sloane

“We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”

—F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Part Three, “On Old and New Tablets,” §23 (excerpt).

People gathered around lava, Iceland.

Eric Sloane