““Reading Plutarch, he lost awareness of the gap in time that divided them—much bigger than the gap between Montaigne and us. It does not matter, he wrote, whether a person one loves has been dead for fifteen hundred years or, like his own father at the time, eighteen years. Both are equally remote; both are equally close. Montaigne’s merging of favorite authors with his own father says a lot about how he read: he took up books as if they were people, and welcomed them into his family.””
![“[...] he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust", he said. "It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had…” quote by Haruki Murakami](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/02b/haruki-murakami-21_book_he-made-it-a-rule-never-to-touch-a-book_1535746.jpg)
![“As history has repeatedly suggested, nothing is more effective for demolishing traditional legal protections than the combined claims that a crime is uniquely dangerous, and that those behind it have exceptional powers of resistance. [On witchburning in France during the 16th Century.]” quote by Sarah Bakewell](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/f48/sarah-bakewell-24972_crime_as-history-has-repeatedly-suggested-noth_1718454.jpg)
