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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fb8fff1 | these sacrifices sustained the cosmic cycle: Maize became blood, and blood was then transformed back into maize. Sacrificial victims were referred to as "tortillas for the gods." | Tom Standage | ||
| c2eab47 | Chappe also had all sorts of ambitious plans for his invention; he hadn't intended its use to be so predominantly military in nature, and wanted to promote its employment in business. | Tom Standage | ||
| 06fc078 | Image of a Roman wax tablet, which looks very like an iPad. | Tom Standage | ||
| 90af9b2 | He proposed a steam-powered pneumatic tube system to carry telegraph forms the short distance from the Stock Exchange to the main telegraph office. | Tom Standage | ||
| df3dcda | Spices were certainly regarded as antidotes to earthly squalor in another, more mystical sense. They were thought to be splinters of paradise that had found their way into the ordinary world. | Tom Standage | ||
| d87cba3 | There is no hope of any major increase in scientific knowledge by grafting or adding the new on top of the old," Bacon declared in his book The New Logic, published in 1620. "The restoration of the sciences must start from the bottom-most foundations--unless we prefer to go round in perpetual circles at a contemptibly slow rate." | Tom Standage | ||
| eadd753 | In the computer era we have returned to the custom of scrolling through texts, but we now scroll up and down, rather than right to left as the Romans did.) | Tom Standage | ||
| 38dd3e2 | Post Horses and Conveyances of every description may be ordered by the electric telegraph to be in readiness on the arrival of a train, at either Paddington or Slough Station. | Tom Standage | ||
| 094be93 | It is a sign of a medium's immaturity when one of the main topics of discussion is the medium itself. | Tom Standage | ||
| 6471983 | Anyone who started a quarrel had to atone for it by buying a dish of coffee for everyone present. | coffee-houses | Tom Standage | |
| acb3f17 | people enjoy being able to articulate their interests and define themselves by selectively compiling and resharing content created by others | Tom Standage | ||
| 686ce94 | The mere act of sharing something can, in other words, be a form of self-expression. | Tom Standage | ||
| 822d60e | When coffee became popular in Oxford and the coffee houses selling it began to multiply, the university authorities tried to clamp down, worrying that coffee houses promoted idleness and distracted members of the university from their studies | coffee-houses distraction studying | Tom Standage | |
| 37b638d | Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. --Marcus Tullius Cicero | Tom Standage | ||
| 4b62f89 | Although it is no longer customary to offer visitors a straw through which to drink from a communal vat of beer, today tea or coffee may be offered from a shared pot, or a glass of wine or spirits from a shared bottle. And when drinking alcohol in a social setting, the clinking of glasses symbolically reunites the glasses into a single vessel of shared liquid. These are traditions with very ancient origins. | Tom Standage | ||
| d1ddcf6 | When George Washington ran for election to Virginia's local assembly, the House of Burgesses, in 1758, his campaign team handed out twenty-eight gallons of rum, fifty gallons of rum punch, thirty-four of wine, forty-six of beer, and two of cider--in a county with only 391 voters. | Tom Standage | ||
| 792310b | Descendants of de Clieu's original plant were also proliferating in the region, in Haiti, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. Ultimately, Brazil became the world's dominant coffee supplier, leaving Arabia far behind. | coffee gabriel-mathieu-de-clieu | Tom Standage | |
| b349609 | THE TWENTIETH CENTURY was a period defined by the struggle for individual political, economic, and personal liberty against various forms of oppression, and marked by war, genocide, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. | Tom Standage | ||
| 085687a | There were no musicians or dancers, for Plato believed that educated men ought to be capable of entertaining themselves by "speaking and listening in turns in an orderly manner." | Tom Standage | ||
| dbc8bc9 | At the time there were no printing presses and no paper. | Tom Standage | ||
| e1d96ac | In the United States radio listeners were gathered up by networks that saw them as consumers to be sold to; in Britain they were the masses to be instructed and improved; in Germany they were the people to be indoctrinated and misled. | Tom Standage | ||
| 2f260be | This new, telegraphic writing style also influenced public speaking: short sound bites became popular because they were easier for stenographers to transcribe, and cheaper and quicker for reporters to transmit. | Tom Standage | ||
| f3202f1 | as the historian Tom Standage observes, they were "among the first to recognize the importance of trademarks and advertising, of slogans, logos.... Since the remedies themselves usually cost very little to make, it made sense to spend money on marketing." | Steven Johnson | ||
| 156ef12 | social media is not new. It has been around for centuries. Today, blogs are the new pamphlets. Microblogs and online social networks are the new coffee houses. Media-sharing sites are the new commonplace books. They are all shared, social platforms that enable ideas to travel from one person to another, rippling through networks of people connected by social bonds, rather than having to squeeze through the privileged bottleneck of broadcast.. | Tom Standage | ||
| bc7ad05 | One survey of American newspapers found that the number of articles written by papers' own writers increased from 25 percent to 45 percent between the 1820s and 1850s. | Tom Standage | ||
| 914be11 | The practice of linking entire networks, rather than individual computers, came to be known as "internetworking" or" | Tom Standage | ||
| b21a479 | Six beverages in particular--beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola--chart the flow of world history. Three contain alcohol, and three contain caffeine, but what they all have in common is that each one was the defining drink during a pivotal historical period, from antiquity to the present day. | Tom Standage | ||
| ed8bc7d | If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him. You must treat him like one of your own people and love him as yourselves, for you were strangers in Egypt. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 4a1fcac | novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 323975f | And before you embark on an argument or a debate, ask yourself honestly if you are ready to change your mind. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| b558b47 | The great genius of the Shiah was its tragic perception that it is impossible fully to implement the ideals of religion in the inescapably violent realm of politics. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 120159c | Jefferson the deist was accused of being an atheist and even a Muslim. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 88421b3 | But during the nineteenth century, Europe was reconfigured into clearly defined states ruled by a central government. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 266667c | Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 77d5d80 | He was simply a nadhir, a messenger with a warning, and should approach the Quraysh humbly, avoid provocation, and be careful not to attack their gods. This is what the great prophets had done in the past.28 A prophet had to be altruistic; he must not trumpet his own opinions egotistically or trample on the sensibilities of others, but should always put the welfare of the community first. A | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 0c8fd49 | Remember that we can become twinned with an enemy and come to resemble him. Our hatred may become an alter ego, a part of our identity. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 0bf4b77 | Politics had never been central to the Christian religious experience. Jesus had, after all, said that his Kingdom was not of this world. For centuries, the Jews of Europe had refrained from political involvement as a matter of principle. But politics was no secondary issue for Muslims. We have seen that it had been the theatre of their religious quest. Salvation did not mean redemption from sin, but the creation of a just society in which .. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 80dd135 | Where Ibn al-Arabi had written for the intellectual, Rumi was summoning all human beings to live beyond themselves, and to transcend the routines of daily life. The Mathnawi celebrated the Sufi lifestyle which can make everyone an indomitable hero of a battle waged perpetually in the cosmos and within the soul. The Mongol invasions had led to a mystical movement, which helped people come to terms with the catastrophe they had experienced at.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 54c0871 | Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus | Karen Armstrong | ||
| a564f30 | The violent secularism of al-Nasser had led Qutb to espouse a form of Islam that distorted both the message of the Quran and the Prophet's life. Qutb told Muslims to model themselves on Muhammad: to separate themselves from mainstream society (as Muhammad had made the hijrah from Mecca to Medina), and then engage in a violent jihad. But Muhammad had in fact finally achieved victory by an ingenious policy of non-violence; the Quran adamantly.. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| f236cb0 | In the eleventh century, a Jerusalem rabbi still recalled with gratitude the mercy God had shown his people when he allowed the "Kingdom of Ishmael" to conquer Palestine." | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 6a2e942 | A myth could not tell a hunter how to kill his prey or how to organise an expedition efficiently, but it helped him to deal with his complicated emotions about the killing of animals. Logos was efficient, practical and rational, but it could not answer questions about the ultimate value of human life nor could it mitigate human pain and sorrow. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| db81dfb | Some Palaeolithic heroes survived in later mythical literature. The Greek hero Herakles, for example, is almost certainly a relic of the hunting period. | Karen Armstrong | ||
| 39c84bc | I was suddenly and completely inundated by it. What had been lost in losing him. | Laura Dave |