1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5226
5227
5228
5229
5230
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ede29d3 | Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike. Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses. Rescuers later reported that wherever they saw spirals of gulls, they knew they would find bodies. Turner's experience left him with such a deep hatred of seagulls, according to Norman, "that until his retirement he used to carry a ... | Erik Larson | ||
| 914dd05 | Undersecretary of State Robert Lansing, number two man in the State Department, tried to put this phenomenon into words in a private memorandum. "It is difficult, if not impossible, for us here in the United States to appreciate in all its fullness the great European War," he wrote. "We have come to read almost with indifference of vast military operations, of battle lines extending for hundreds of miles, of the thousands of dying men, of t.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 22ef5ce | Outside the White House, Wilson's many notes to Germany and their replies became the target of wry humor, as when one editor wrote: "Dear Kaiser: In spite of previous correspondence on the subject another ship with American citizens on board has been sunk. Under the circumstances we feel constrained to inform you, in a spirit of utmost friendliness, that a repetition of the incident will of necessity require the dispatch of another note to .. | Erik Larson | ||
| e19c7d9 | the hospital treated 11,602 patients, sixty-four a day, for injuries and ailments that suggest that the mundane sufferings of people have not changed very much over the ages. The list included: 820 cases of diarrhea; 154, constipation; 21, hemorrhoids; 434, indigestion; 365, foreign bodies in the eyes; 364, severe headaches; 594 episodes of fainting, syncope , and exhaustion; 1 case of extreme flatulence; and 169 involving teeth that hurt l.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 58f274b | Of the four men in Preston Prichard's cabin, D-90, only one survived, his friend Arthur Gadsden. Prichard's body was never recovered, yet in the red volume that now contains the beautifully archived replies to Mrs. Prichard's letters there exists a surprisingly vivid sense of him, as though he resided still in the peripheral vision of the world. | Erik Larson | ||
| 3675af6 | Although her book did include compelling recipes for scrapple, ox cheek, and baked calf's head and tips for the preparation of raccoon, possum, snipe, plovers, and blackbirds (for blackbird pie) and "how to broil, fricassee, stew or fry a squirrel," it was much more than just a cookbook." | Erik Larson | ||
| 6fd8398 | Yet by tracing the migration of guns, one comes readily and vividly to understand where the nation's current patchwork of gun controls have gone astray, and how easily they could be fixed to the increased satisfaction of gun owners and gun opponents alike. | Erik Larson | ||
| 43404a1 | ELSEWHERE in the city, a scheduled passenger named Alta Piper struggled through a restless night in her hotel room. She was the daughter of Leonora Piper, the famed spirit medium known universally as "Mrs. Piper," the only medium that William James, the pioneering Harvard psychologist and sometime psychic investigator, believed to be authentic. Alta seemed to share her mother's gift, for throughout that Friday night, as she claimed later, s.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 2806e11 | He invested heavily in a company that bought perishable foods and shipped them in the latest refrigerated cars to far-off cities. It was a fine, forward-looking business. But the Pullman strike halted all train traffic through Chicago, and the perishable foods rotted in their train-cars. He was ruined. He was still young, however, and still Bloom. He used his remaining funds to buy two expensive suits, on the theory that whatever he did nex.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 2434322 | But old tensions and enmities persisted. Britain's King George V loathed his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany's supreme ruler; and Wilhelm, in turn, envied Britain's expansive collection of colonies and its command of the seas, so much so that in 1900 Germany began a campaign to build warships in enough quantity and of large enough scale to take on the British navy. This in turn drove Britain to begin an extensive modernization of its own .. | Erik Larson | ||
| 118daa9 | Olmsted's greatest concern, however, was that the main, Jackson Park portion of the exposition simply was not fun. "There is too much appearance of an impatient and tired doing of sight-seeing duty. A stint to be got through before it is time to go home. The crowd has a melancholy air in this respect, and strenuous measures should be taken to overcome it." Just as Olmsted sought to conjure an aura of mystery in his landscape, so here he urg.. | Erik Larson | ||
| a0cb375 | our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances. | Erik Larson | ||
| 4a0ecc8 | he was known for throwing elaborate parties, known as "freak dinners"--perhaps most notably the "Gondola Party" he hosted in 1905 at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he filled the hotel's courtyard with water, dressed everyone in Venetian garb, and served dinner to guests aboard a giant gondola. Lest this be deemed insufficient, he arranged to have a birthday cake--five feet tall--brought in on the back of a baby elephant." | Erik Larson | ||
| 9bf92d9 | Cherbourg was leaving Liverpool, the ship | Erik Larson | ||
| 20428d3 | One soldier in the Ypres Salient, at Messines, Belgium, wrote of the frustration of the trench stalemate. "We are still in our old positions, and keep annoying the English and French. The weather is miserable and we often spend days on end knee-deep in water and, what is more, under heavy fire. We are greatly looking forward to a brief respite. Let's hope that soon afterwards the whole front will start moving forward. Things can't go on lik.. | Erik Larson | ||
| db99546 | that I ventured as far as my position would allow and by historical analogy warned men as solemnly as possible against half-educated leaders being permitted to lead nations into war. | Erik Larson | ||
| 4efe350 | At night thunderstorms arose often, shedding lightning that gave the terrain the pallor of a corpse. Fog would settle in for days, causing the edge of the cliff to look like the edge of the material world. At regular intervals the men heard the lost-calf moan of foghorns as steamships waited offshore for clarity. | Erik Larson | ||
| fc806c0 | Intended to sound the alarm and raise England's level of naval preparedness, the story was entertaining, and frightening, but was widely deemed too far-fetched to be believable, for Captain Sirius's behavior would have breached a fundamental maritime code, the cruiser rules, or prize law, established in the nineteenth century to govern warfare against civilian shipping. Obeyed ever since by all seagoing powers, the rules held that a warship.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 0b49e1a | The reference to the Lusitania was obvious enough," he recalled later, "but personally it never entered my mind for a moment that the Germans would actually perpetrate an attack upon her. The culpability of such an act seemed too blatant and raw for an intelligent people to take upon themselves." | Erik Larson | ||
| 7814553 | Goebbels was known for his wit; Martha, for a time, considered him charming. "Infectious and delightful, eyes sparkling, voice soft, his speech witty and light, it is difficult to remember his cruelty, his cunning destructive talents." Her mother, Mattie, always enjoyed being seated next to Goebbels at banquets; Dodd considered him "one of the few men with a sense of humor in Germany" | Erik Larson | ||
| efb5891 | It's all right to drill your crew, but why not drill the passengers. | preparation | Erik Larson | |
| 416eb0e | The United States is remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors or any neighbors at all of anything like her own strength, and lives exempt in an almost unvexed tranquility from the contentions and animosities and the ceaseless pressure and counter-pressure that distract the close-packed older world." While" | Erik Larson | ||
| 915614f | It is true that in this time people set their faces hard for photographs, partly from custom, partly because of deficits in photographic technology, but this crowd might not have smiled for the better part of a century. The women seem suspended in a state somewhere between melancholy and fury and are surrounded by old men in strange beards that look as if someone had dabbed glue at random points on their faces, then hurled buckets of white .. | Erik Larson | ||
| 48e667d | become works of art so detailed, so precisely articulated | Erik Larson | ||
| 1662a67 | For the first time he began to wonder whether he should jettison his transatlantic dream and settle for something more quotidian, perhaps focus his company on ship-to-shore communication. There was | Erik Larson | ||
| f0fa58c | One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons. Years later he would find himself aboard the airship Hindenburg, on its fatal last flight; he survived, albeit badly burned. Otherwise, the Lusitania was heavily booked, especially in the lesser classes. | Erik Larson | ||
| ac389d6 | In an article about the warning, the paper quoted Cunard's New York manager, Charles Sumner, as saying that in the danger zone "there is a general system of convoying British ships. The British Navy is responsible for all British ships, and especially for Cunarders." The Times reporter said, "Your speed, too, is a safeguard, is it not?" "Yes," Sumner replied; "as for submarines, I have no fear of them whatever." | Erik Larson | ||
| 10bd5c0 | A British journalist, Sydney Brooks, writing in the North American Review, gauged America to be just as isolationist as ever. And why not, he asked? "The United States is remote, unconquerable, huge, without hostile neighbors or any neighbors at all of anything like her own strength, and lives exempt in an almost unvexed tranquility from the contentions and animosities and the ceaseless pressure and counter-pressure that distract the close-.. | Erik Larson | ||
| 094b102 | That un-American institution, the trades union, has developed its un-American principle of curtailing or abolishing the personal freedom of the individual in a new direction, that of seeking, as far as possible, to cripple the World's Fair. | Erik Larson | ||
| 1c9610a | Herbert] Hoover, had he been challenged with the overpowering implausibility of his notion that economic life is a race that is won by the ablest runner, would have had a ready answer from his own biography: had he not started in life as a poor orphan and worked in the mines for a pittance, and had he not become first a millionaire and then President of the United States? There are times when nothing is more misleading than personal experie.. | Richard Hofstadter | ||
| 354cc98 | The truly creative mind is hardly ever so much alone as when it is trying to be sociable. The | Richard Hofstadter | ||
| c4d350e | Trump's base is the logical end point of both the anti-intellectualism and the oft-cited "paranoid style of American politics" predicted by the great historian and observer of American political life Richard Hofstadter in 1964." | Rick Wilson | ||
| 3d59c4d | It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result--ruthlessness in political life. | Richard Hofstadter | ||
| dfcda6e | John C.] Calhoun was a minority spokesman in a democracy, a particularist in an age of nationalism, a slaveholder in an age of advancing liberties, and an agrarian in a furiously capitalistic country. His weakness was to be inhumanly schematic and logical, which is only to say that he thought as he lived. His mind, in a sense, was too masterful - it imposed itself upon realities. The great human, emotional, moral complexities of the world e.. | Richard Hofstadter | ||
| e0743ce | Once great men created fortunes; today a great system creates fortunate men. | Richard Hofstadter | ||
| 036a1cd | Today, partly because many "conservative" schools have borrowed discriminatingly from progressive innovations, we may easily forget how dismal and self-satisfied the older conservative pedagogy often was, how it accepted, or even exploited, the child's classroom passivity, how much scope it afforded to excessively domineering teachers, how heavily it depended on rote learning. The main strength of progressivism came from its freshness in me.. | Richard Hofstadter | ||
| ecf578e | The deeper historical sources of the Great Inquisition are best revealed by the other enthusiasms of its devotees: hatred of Franklin D. Roosevelt, implacable opposition to New Deal reforms, desire to banish or destroy the United Nations, anti-Semitism, Negrophobia, isolationism, a passion for the repeal of the income tax, fear of poisoning by fluoridation of the water system, opposition to modernism in the churches. McCarthy's own expressi.. | Richard Hofstadter | ||
| b3f1993 | He reminded her of the way male lions look sad, as if their nobility is a terrible weight. | nobility sadness | Elizabeth Kostova | |
| b57b946 | Manchmal gibt es kaum etwas Schwierigeres, als zu jemandem zu sprechen, der ueber die Macht des Schweigens verfuegt. | Elizabeth Kostova | ||
| f00dc4b | I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad. | sanity | Elizabeth Kostova | |
| f90c4fc | It's the reward of the business (historian), to look history in the eye & say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me. | history knowing | Elizabeth Kostova | |
| 691f767 | Then he said a strange thing, but to himself. `They lived, didn't they?' And I said yes, that when one reads old letters one understands that people in the past really did live, and it is very touching. | Elizabeth Kostova | ||
| c9aab39 | People seem to believe that despair is the same as anguish, but it is not. It's true that despair is surrounded by anguish, but at its core, despair is silent, a blank page. | Elizabeth Kostova | ||
| 38f8d53 | I would not allow anyone into the center of myself; I would make myself a place to go, deep inside, no matter what happened. | Elizabeth Kostova |