When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect—we even demand—that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only [...]
Archive for the ‘Quotation’ Category
What Americans expect
Posted in Quotation, USA on April 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
What accompanies us
Posted in Books, Quotation on March 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Among all forms of prehistoric religion, the strangest and most difficult to understand in our own day seems the cult of the dead, the constant presence of the dead in every aspect of life. To a prehistoric man, in contrast, our strangest and most mysterious form of worship would be our use of books. Yet [...]
Life after the end of sacrifice
Posted in History, Quotation on March 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
In his book The Ruin of Kasch, Roberto Calasso argues that humanity lost an important outlet when we banned the ritual of sacrifice, because the craving to sacrifice now permeates life rather than being bounded and limited by the tradition of a ritual. The Aztecs killed a few to (as they saw it) appease their [...]
How libraries reinvented knowledge
Posted in Academic, History, LIS, Quotation on December 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Ian F. McNeely and Lisa Wolverton note how the development by the Greeks of libraries, as storehouses of the written word, changed the possibilities of knowledge from what they had been in a purely oral society:
Every library comfortably contains writings and juxtaposes ideas that, if they were represented by their proponents in the flesh, might [...]
Words to remember after Tuesday
Posted in Politics, Quotation on November 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
[Vauvenargues] warns, following Spinoza, that it serves no useful purpose to engage in revolution, or throw out a tyrant, if the people do nothing to change such systems of law and authority as pave the way for despotism. If the people want no more tyranny then they must learn to change their laws and create [...]
Why Warren Buffett can keep going
Posted in Commerce, Quotation on October 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Financial maneuvering is a form of endeavor favorable to old men: The financial brain, unlike brains adept in various other areas—for example, mathematics, physics, chess, and, quite possibly, armed bank robbery—apparently deteriorates very little, if at all, with passage of time, even in the eighth and ninth decades of life.
– John Brooks, “Spanish Privateer”, 1978
The unavoidable superficial
Posted in Academic, Philosophy, Quotation on September 29, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The following reflection on the unknowable vastness of human knowledge was written 75 years ago:
Human knowledge had become unmanageably vast; every science had begotten a dozen more, each subtler than the rest; the telescope revealed stars and systems beyond the mind of man to number or to name; geology spoke in terms of millions of [...]
GOP words of wisdom
Posted in History, Politics, Quotation on September 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
For the 1916 presidential election, Republican leaders tried to find a candidate who could unite the party, after the Progressive split of 1912 had cost the GOP the presidency.
The elders’ first choice for a unifier was Elihu Root, who had won the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize and been a cabinet member for 10 years. He [...]
American freedom
Posted in History, Quotation, USA on August 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The land of the free! [America] is the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that’s my freedom. Free? Why I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow-countrymen. Because, as I say, they [...]
Newspaper control
Posted in History, Media, Quotation, USA on August 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Newspapers have a much greater importance in America than they do in Europe. You must not conclude, however, that the press is more free in the New World than in the Old. With us it is the government that watches over and controls the newspapers; in the United States, the religious sects and political parties [...]
Knowledge
Posted in Academic, Quotation on August 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
[Gustave Flaubert's comic characters Bouvard and Pécuchet] discovered through their friendship a common purpose: the pursuit of universal knowledge. To achieve this ambitious goal […] they attempted to read everything they could find on every branch of human endeavor, and cull from their readings the most outstanding facts and ideas, an enterprise that was, of [...]
Old money, Part 2
Posted in Commerce, History, Quotation on August 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I find these quotes from Bernstein fascinating because popular history books so often mention money, but so rarely describe what that money was.
[The eight-real "Spanish dollar"], which flooded the European currency markets in the sixteenth century, was approximately the same size and weight as the Bohemian thaler—from which the word “dollar” derives. (Since eight reales [...]
Old money
Posted in Commerce, History, Quotation on July 31, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The basic unit of currency of the premodern world was remarkably constant: a small gold coin weighing approximately four grams—one-eighth of an ounce—and about the size of a present-day American dime, appearing in various times and places as the French livre, Florentine florin, Spanish or Venetian ducat, Portuguese cruzado, dinar of the Muslim world, Byzantine [...]
