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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 432c4a1 | The Mongol army had accomplished in a mere two years what the European Crusaders from the West and the Seljuk Turks from the East had failed to do in two centuries of sustained effort. They had conquered the heart of the Arab world. No other non-Muslim troops would conquer Baghdad or Iraq again until the arrival of the American and British forces in 2003. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 602bcb5 | The Mongols, and certainly Genghis Khan in particular, placed great importance on sudden individual acts of unexpected heroism. Those are the moments that reveal not just the character of the person, but the soul itself. Many people are paralyzed by fear or, equally as debilitating, by indecision. The hero acts, and often fails, but acts nonetheless. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 8fb5fc7 | War for the nomadic people was a sort of production. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 127e583 | images of the Madonna and the Christ Child carved in ivory and exported to Europe. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| c8bbcb2 | Terror, he realized, was best spread not by the acts of warriors, but by the pens of scribes and scholars. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| d479536 | Because you are the daughter of your Khan father, you are sent to govern the people of the Oirat tribe. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 028b158 | Be sincere always, | Jack Weatherford | ||
| ef5a53b | The myth of the pioneer family or lone frontiersman venturing into virgin forest to hack out a meager homestead is belied by the thoroughly organized commercial value of such ventures. The main figure in the settlement of the west was the land company, which frequently operated not only on the edge of civilization but on the edge of legality as well. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| d7624fc | For the next ten years, until 1251, she and a small group of other women controlled the largest empire in world history. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| edb6ced | One of the first to reevaluate Genghis Khan was an unlikely candidate: peace advocate Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of Indian independence. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 585c0c9 | For the Mongols, the lifestyle of the peasant seemed incomprehensible. The Jurched territory was filled with so many people and yet so few animals; this was a stark contrast to Mongolia, where there were normally five to ten animals for each human. To the Mongols, the farmers' fields were just grasslands, as were the gardens, and the peasants were like grazing animals rather than real humans who ate meat. The Mongols referred to these grass.. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| f44ab2e | The Mongols made culture portable. It was not enough to merely exchange goods, because whole systems of knowledge had to also be transported in order to use many of the new products. Drugs, for example, were not profitable items of trade unless there was adequate knowledge of how to use them. Toward this objective, the Mongol court imported Persian and Arab doctors into China, and they exported Chinese doctors to the Middle East. Every form.. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 3d966ca | When it came time to retire to his chamber for the night, the khan had his pick of beautiful young women, all of whom had been tested to make sure that they did not snore, have bad breath, or discharge any unpleasant body odors. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| c8bb8db | Raiding followed a geographic pattern originating in the north. The southern tribes that lived closest to the trade cities of the Silk Route always had more goods than the more distant northern tribes. The southern men had the best weapons, and to succeed against them, the northern men had to move quicker, think more cleverly, and fight harder. This alternating pattern of trade and raiding supplied a slow, but steady, trickle of metal and t.. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 641f444 | khan's mobile unit of doctors and pharmacists served him a tea made from orange peel, kudzu flowers, ginseng, sandalwood, and cardamom. Sipped on an empty stomach, the tea was guaranteed to overcome a hangover and make the khan fit for another day of hunting, eating, and drinking. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| a47cbab | Only a few details have survived from Temujin's earliest childhood, and they do not suggest that he was highly valued by his father. His father once accidentally left him behind when they moved to another camp. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 5cb0776 | Despite the initial reliance of commerce on routes created through military conquest, it soon became obvious that whereas armies moved quickest by horse across land, massive quantities of goods moved best by water. Mongols expanded and lengthened the Grand Canal that already connected the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers to transport grain and other agricultural products farther and more efficiently into the northern districts. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 1a1d8ab | To promote trade along these routes, Mongol authorities distributed an early type of combined passport and credit card. The Mongol paiza was a tablet of gold, silver, or wood larger than a man's hand, and it would be worn on a chain around the neck or attached to the clothing. Depending on which metal was used and the symbols such as tigers or gyrfalcons, illiterate people could ascertain the importance of the traveler and thereby render th.. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 61f746e | In contrast to almost every major army in history, the Mongols traveled lightly, without a supply train. By waiting until the coldest months to make the desert crossing, men and horses required less water. Dew also formed during this season, thereby stimulating the growth of some grass that provided grazing for horses and attracted game that the men eagerly hunted for their own sustenance. Instead of transporting slow-moving siege engines a.. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 5a42bc2 | In conquering their empire, not only had the Mongols revolutionized warfare, they also created the nucleus of a universal culture and world system. This new global culture continued to grow long after the demise of the Mongol Empire, and through continued development over the coming centuries, it became the foundation for the modern world system with the original Mongol emphases on free commerce, open communication, shared knowledge, secula.. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 3074e86 | I was suddenly aware, almost in a panic - a joyful panic - of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself. My | Claire Messud | ||
| ea87374 | tons. Marco Polo, who sailed from China to Persia on his return home, described the Mongol ships as large four-masted junks with up to three hundred crewmen and as many as sixty cabins for merchants carrying various wares. According to Ibn Battuta, some of the ships even carried plants growing in wooden tubs in order to supply fresh food for the sailors. Khubilai Khan promoted the building of ever larger seagoing junks to carry heavy loads .. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| cdf9a7a | The attack was designed as a show of overwhelming strength for which the audience was not the already conquered people of Bukhara, but the still distant army and people of Samarkand, the next city on his march. The Mongol invaders rolled up their newly constructed siege engines--catapults, trebuchets, and mangonels that hurled not only stones and fire, as besieging armies had done for centuries, but also pots of burning liquids, exploding d.. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 093efc3 | Smell holds a deep, important place within steppe culture. Where people in other cultures might hug or kiss at meeting or departing, the steppe nomads sniff one another in a gesture much like a kiss on the cheek. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 91889b7 | The recipes of the dishes served Khubilai Khan still survive. They include a variety of foods but maintain the traditional Mongol emphasis on meat and dairy products. The members of the Mongol court ate such delicacies as strips of mutton tail fat dusted with flour and baked with leeks. Bull testicles fried in hot oil, basted with saffron paste, and sprinkled with coriander. Mutton boiled with cardamom and cinnamon and served with rice and .. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 60e7212 | Whether in their policy of religious tolerance, devising a universal alphabet, maintaining relay stations, playing games, or printing almanacs, money, or astronomy charts, the rulers of the Mongol Empire displayed a persistent universalism. Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implem.. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 6276c5d | The traditional Chinese kingdoms operated under centuries of constraints on commerce. The building of walls on their borders had been a way of limiting such trade and literally keeping the wealth of the nation intact and inside the walls. For such administrators, giving up trade goods was the same as paying tribute to their neighbors, and they sought to avoid it as much as they could. The Mongols directly attacked the Chinese cultural preju.. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 8b40456 | Genghis Khan's ability to manipulate people and technology represented the experienced knowledge of more than four decades of nearly constant warfare. At no single, crucial moment in his life did he suddenly acquire his genius at warfare, his ability to inspire the loyalty of his followers, or his unprecedented skill for organizing on a global scale. These derived not from epiphanic enlightenment or formal schooling but from a persistent cy.. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| b9a0366 | The truth may be hard to find, but it is out there--somewhere. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 812c10d | Under the chivalrous rules of warfare as practiced in Europe and the Middle East during the Crusades, enemy aristocrats displayed superficial, and often pompous, respect for one another while freely slaughtering common soldiers. Rather than kill their aristocratic enemy on the battlefield, they preferred to capture him as a hostage whom they could ransom back to his family or country. The Mongols did not share this code. To the contrary, th.. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 688a932 | Although the army of Genghis Khan killed at an unprecedented rate and used death almost as a matter of policy and certainly as a calculated means of creating terror, they deviated from standard practices of the time in an important and surprising way. The Mongols did not torture, mutilate, or maim. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 3e4281d | In one of his most important lessons, he told his sons that conquering an army is not the same as conquering a nation. You may conquer an army with superior tactics and men, but you can conquer a nation only by conquering the hearts of the people. | Jack Weatherford | ||
| 7ca363c | Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us - not so much as a stray molecule8 - that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters. | Bill Bryson | ||
| 276756e | There is, I came to realize, what the mind wants and what the body wants. The mind can excite the body, but its desires can also be false; whereas the body, the animal, wants what it wants. | Claire Messud | ||
| 787d6dc | It continued to amaze me how the touch of skin on skin had altered things: curled in the crook of his arm, my head upon his breast, I'd sensed his heart beating and for a moment hadn't been sure whether it was mine. | Claire Messud | ||
| 1523d63 | I wanted him to reassure me, and when I saw he wasn't going to, I thought, This is when the shit hits the fan. | Claire Messud | ||
| a1f7837 | That's sort of what happened with Cassie and me. I guess I was Goya, just doing my thing, and she was the French Revolution. | Claire Messud | ||
| 19a9ae8 | S]he was my Muse, my alcoholic's bourbon on the rocks: irresistible. | Claire Messud | ||
| 164fcfd | He said that's what family is for: the people who love you see you in the best light, as you want to be seen. | Claire Messud | ||
| 88025a4 | I needed them, sure, and we can all argue about the moment when the balance tipped and I needed them so much that I would hurt. But you can't pretend they didn't need me too, each in his or her way. They wouldn't necessarily have admitted it - except Reza - but you can't tell me they didn't love me. The heart knows. The body knows. When I was with Sirena, or Reza, or Skandar, the air moved differently between us; time passed differently; wo.. | obsession | Claire Messud | |
| fbc3810 | Marina, feeling entitled, never really asked herself if she was good enough. Whereas he, Julius, asked himself repeatedly, answered always in the affirmative, and marveled at the wider world's apparent inability to see the light. He would have to show them. | Claire Messud | ||
| 4506d8b | there's a period of accommodation before you are formally and | Claire Messud | ||
| 14912ea | When, as a woman, you make yourself the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at, then whatever else, you aren't alone. | Claire Messud | ||
| 8fd38a4 | Live, my dear Nora. Satisfy your hunger. There's food all around you, you know.' 'What kind of food, I'd like to know?' 'Ah'-he smiled- 'you must taste all things, actually to know if you like them.' And what good is that, I wanted to ask, if the most delicious fruit is forbidden? | Claire Messud |