Love the pride of the conquered nations, and leave them to honour their father and their mother. - Karen Blixen

It was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet like the strong and refined essence of a continent... The views were immensely wide — everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.

'Are you sure,' she asked, 'that it is God whom you serve?' The Cardinal looked up, met her eyes and smiled very gently. 'That,' he said, 'that, Madame, is a risk which the artists and the priests of this world have to run!'

Within this enclosed women's world, so to say, behind the walls and fortifications of it, I felt the presence of a great ideal, without which the garrison would not have carried on so gallantly; the idea of a Millennium when women were to reign supreme in the world. The old mother at such times would take on a new shape, and sit enthroned as a massive dark symbol of that mighty female deity who had existed in old ages, before the time of the prophet's God. Of her they never lost sight, but they were, before all, practical people with an eye on the needs of the moment and with infinite readiness of resource.