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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ed51983 | Lafayette took umbrage - just gobs and gobs of umbrage - at the patriots' vilification of his countrymen for leaving Newport. | newport umbrage | Sarah Vowell | |
| ddcb491 | In the first summer of the Iraqi war, on the crabby, sweaty second day of a blackout that shut down the northeast's power grid, I stood in line for questionable foodstuffs in my dark neighborhood deli. It reeked of souring milk. An annoyingly upbeat fellow-shopper chirped, "Cheer up, everybody, we're part of history!" Maybe because I was suffering the effects of allergy eyes brought on the night before by trying to read by the light of lila.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 32eca53 | The neighborhood of Gramercy Park, where Edwin used to live, was built to look like London, which is to say that its considerable beauty is skin deep while its heart beats with the ugliness of monarchy. And at its very center, inside the gates keeping out the riffraff that is all New York, stands the statue of the sad and fancy Edwin Booth, dressed as Hamlet, his signature role. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| a2a96a1 | Yes, they're a little biased there," I agree. Mike smiles at this understatement, knowing as I do that saying they're a little biased in Mudd's favor at the Mudd-family-run Mudd home in Maryland is like saying cheese steaks are kind of associated with Philadelphia." | Sarah Vowell | ||
| a1a19d0 | After Hymns and tears, they boarded the brig Thaddeus, a vessel so crappy, it made the Mayflower look like the QE2. | mayflower missionary thaddeus | Sarah Vowell | |
| 1290af7 | A gifted violin player in danger of becoming a virtuoso and thus too attached to his instrument handed it over to the Oneida authorities and never played again. When a visiting Canadian teacher complained that the community did not foster "genius or special talent," Noyes was delighted, replying, "We never expected or desired to produce a Byron, a Napoleon, or a Michelangelo." You know you've reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when e.. | individuality mediocrity oneida talent | Sarah Vowell | |
| 07244ea | on the illusive "Monsieur Hortalez." When my friend Steven and I went looking for the building one afternoon, we came to the address at 47 rue Vieille-du-Temple and realized we had been there before." | Sarah Vowell | ||
| b589301 | Jeff Davis's name they'll proudly praise, ah ha, ah ha And Lincoln's tomb will be disgraced, ah ha, ah ha The nation's flag will lose its stars The stripes they'll change to rebel bars And we'll all wear gray if the Johnnies get into power | Sarah Vowell | ||
| f2b880f | One of the slight variances between the Stalwarts and their fellow Republicans the Half-Breeds is that the Half-Breeds, partly out of frustration with the Civil War sainthood of Grant, were clean-shirt guys more interested in stumping for mild civil service reform--a platform whose merit would make for a less stirring campaign song. A bureaucrat should pass a test, hurrah, hurrah! | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 489144d | In the forensics novels the contents of a victim's pockets on the night of her death Say Something about her character. My Ford's Theatre ticket stub and Jimmy Carter key chain say that I am the corniest, goody-goody person in town. Luckily, I survived the evening unscathed so no one will ever find out about that losery Jimmy Carter key chain. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| b6699d0 | Back inside, I'm shown an antique cabinet in which members of the community, famous for their homegrown produce, dried herbs. The Oneida Community was an upstate tourist attraction right from the start, second, Valesky says, to Niagara Falls. I'm taking the same guided tour offered a hundred and fifty years ago to prim rubbernecks who came here to peep at sex fiends. I wonder how many of my vacationing forebears went home disappointed? Th.. | herbs odor oneida selfishness smells | Sarah Vowell | |
| 4d5581f | Before the verb "to electrocute" came to define death by electricity, Edison advocated that the verb be named for his nemesis, that a person who had been electrocuted would have been westinghoused instead. I bet Westinghouse came up with some possible definitions of what it meant to be edisoned himself." | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 492291f | In his reply, Washington acknowledged his fellow Americans' "fatal tendency of disunion." The" | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 91c8f3c | I see plainly that America can defend herself if proper measures are taken," he wrote, adding ominously, "and now I begin to fear she should be lost by herself and her own sons." The" | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 473d229 | Lafayette, "I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence." Spoken like every only child ever. Lafayette" | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 2250c5b | Sir," I said, "except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between." -- | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 62328c2 | In other words, the most ardent republicans since the fall of Rome were asking their king to help them prevail over the representative legislature of the world's oldest constitutional monarchy, the great symbol and protector of British freedom. From | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 8ecc978 | Another reason I'm intrigued with the hanged of Salem, especially the women, is that a number of them aroused suspicion in the first place because they were financially independent, or sharp-tongued, or kept to themselves. In other words, they were killed off for living the same sort of life I live right now but with longer skirts and fewer cable channels. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| f72b3f0 | Jefferson's pretty phrases were incomplete without the punctuation of French gunpowder. That | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 077146c | Protestantism's evolution away from hierarchy and authority has enormous consequences for America and the world. On the one hand, the democratization of religion runs parallel to political democratization. The king of England, questioning the pope, inspires English subjects to question the king and his Anglican bishops. Such dissent is backed up by a Bible full of handy Scripture arguing for arguing with one's kIng. This is the root of self.. | anti-intellectualism democracy know-nothings protestantism sola-fide | Sarah Vowell | |
| 83f5594 | The English Puritans were obsessed with the idea of providence, and that word is more ominous to them than it sounds to us. It means care, but it also means control. It does not just mean that God will provide. It means that God will provide whatever the hell God wants and the Puritans will thank him for it even if He provides them with nothing more than a slow death in a long winter. It means that if they're scared and small and lowly enou.. | authoritarianism calvinism providence | Sarah Vowell | |
| 94f1606 | To me, the highlight of the event is watching a reenactor in a long striped dress sitting alone on a blanket, winding yarn. Absorbed in the task of wrapping strands of wool around her hand, she never looks up. Watching her is so mesmerizing and oddly sacred that it never occurs to me to interrupt her and ask her name or how she got into the yarn-winding reenactment biz, maybe because she isn't recreating; she is creating. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| b6eb0d2 | The words Lafayette used to describe that triumph--"I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence"--applied to getting his way regarding America as well. Perhaps the most emblematic anecdote foretelling Lafayette's stubborn refusal to give up his American dream was the boyhood story about how one day, one of his Parisian schoolteachers was talking up the virtues of an obedient horse. According to Lafayette, "I described .. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| faf12c2 | In other words, ideas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences. As the British historian and politician Lord Acton described the effect that our Revolutionary War had on our French allies, "What the French took from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government--their cutting, not their sewing." | Sarah Vowell | ||
| cd2139b | The First Amendment, he explained, exposed tolerance as a sham, because tolerance implies one superior group of people deigning to put up with their inferiors. "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights," Washington wrote. "For, happily, the Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecu.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| cb2ac64 | Along with voting, jury duty, and paying taxes, goofing off is one of the central obligations of American citizenship. So when my friends Joel and Stephen and I play hooky from our jobs in the middle of the afternoon to play Pop-A-Shot in a room full of children, I like to think we are not procrastinators; we are patriots pursuing happiness. | goofing-off humor patriotism procrastination | Sarah Vowell | |
| e0485b5 | It is unfair of me to say so, but the slogan Booth shouted from the stage of Ford's Theatre, the over-blown, self-important, pseudo-Shakespearean blather, being etched on the sign marking his death feels like the stamp of approval. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| a7cae88 | Never have I enjoyed such swearing, before or since. Sir, on that memorable day, he swore like an angel from Heaven. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 8a728be | disunity is the through line in the national plot--not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington's army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen's pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbors, getting on each other's nerves is our right. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 7ef381e | Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. He was a realist who had no illusions about human nature. "The motives which predominate most human affairs," he said, "are self-love and self-interest." The common people, like the common soldiers in his army, could not be expected to be "influenced by any other principles than those of interest." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| bb05191 | The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution. Only with the elimination of slavery could this nation that Jefferson had called "the world's best hope" for democracy even begin to fulfill its great promise." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 2fa7965 | In monarchies, each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by beer, or force, by patronage, or by honor, and by professional standing armies. By contrast, republics had to hold themselves together from the bottom up, ultimately. | government law republicanism virtue | Gordon S. Wood | |
| dd0effd | Yet, more is at stake in this debate beyond simply acknowledging the religious inclinations of those people involved in the nation's founding. The Founders gave birth to the United States in a way that is unparalleled in the history of most nations. "Unlike so many nations with origins lost in the distant past, the United States began as a political entity in a specific time and place, as the handiwork of specific individuals." The United S.. | Steven K. Green | ||
| fca14a5 | By contrast, said Jefferson, the Southerners were "fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 81f0fa1 | As Oliver Ellsworth, the third chief justice of the United States, declared, "As population increases, poor labourers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country."42 The leaders simply did not count on the remarkable demographic capacity of the slave states themselves, especially Virginia, to produce slaves for the expanding areas of the Deep South and the Southwest." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 0cb1328 | These multiplying societies treated the sick, aided the industrious poor, housed orphans, fed imprisoned debtors, built huts for shipwrecked sailors, and, in the case of the Massachusetts Humane Society, even attempted to resuscitate those suffering from "suspended animation," that is, those such as drowning victims who appeared to be dead but actually were not. The fear of being buried alive was a serious concern at this time. Many, like W.. | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 1224a42 | Only "those few, who being attached to no particular occupation themselves," said Smith, "have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 04115cb | John Adams] is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him. | john-adams thomas-jefferson | Gordon S. Wood | |
| 216758d | It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg"--" | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| a1a7e68 | You did a politics project on a government that got overthrown on the due date? Man, did anybody ever tell you you've got no luck?" "I suspected it," said Raymond ironically." | humor luck politics project school | Gordon Korman | |
| 77a067c | It's like living your whole life without ever looking in a mirror, Amy thought, and suddenly you see your reflection, and you're a monster. | Gordon Korman | ||
| e4f30c2 | The Janus, the Tomas, the Ekaterina, and the Lucian! | Gordon Korman | ||
| 1a7b41a | UNIDENTIFIED | Gordon Korman | ||
| 2b537dc | Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, I'll conk you with this pet carrier! | Gordon Korman |