““It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it; and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three Andes’ summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.””
![“And here Dante describes an evidently spherical world... "The lamp of the world [the sun] rises to mortals through different passages; but through that which joins four circles with three crosses [the position of the rising sun at the vernal equinox] it issues with a better course and conjoined…” quote by Dante Alighieri](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/cdc/dante-alighieri-590_circles_and-here-dante-describes-an-evidently-sp_1811951.jpg)
![“That was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do [give me asylum application]. Now we have the U.S. election [campaign], the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing.” quote by Julian Assange](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/2f2/julian-assange-1566_application_that-was-a-brave-and-principled-thing-fo_498184.jpg)
![“Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal…” quote by Julian Assange](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/66f/julian-assange-1566_asylums_here-we-have-a-case-the-swedish-case-whe_1023735.jpg)
