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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 87a12db | The more history I learn, the more the world fills up with stories. Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey caffe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire o.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 20b5062 | the amateur historian's next stop after Boy, people used to be so stupid is People: still stupid. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| f632b91 | joie de vivre. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 0e05366 | the cheapest, most pleasurable way for a country of strangers to get to know each other and the rest of the world is through reading. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 79066a1 | David, you don't want to get rid of the cracks and the crevices in the building because that's where the ghosts hide. And if you get rid of the ghosts, the Chelsea will just be any other building. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| c0c1e8f | For the better part of the 1990s, it seemed like the only Americans who publicly described themselves as patriots were scary militia types hiding out in the backwoods of Michigan and Montana, cleaning their guns. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| ce65f8d | A Brief Guide to Welsh Pronunciation c a hard 'c' sound (Cadfael) ch a non-English sound as in Scottish 'ch' in 'loch' (Fychan) dd a buzzy 'th' sound, as in 'there' (Ddu; Gwynedd) f as in 'of' (Cadfael) ff as in 'off' (Gruffydd) g a hard 'g' sound, as in 'gas' (Goronwy) l as in 'lamp' (Llywelyn) ll a breathy 'thl' sound that does not occur in English (Llywelyn) rh a breathy mix between 'r' and 'rh' that does not occur in English (Rhys) th a.. | Sarah Woodbury | ||
| e8b9ff7 | I like to call him "the current president" because it's a hopeful phrase, implying that his administration is only temporary." | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 947e335 | I don't have a driver's license (phobia). | Sarah Vowell | ||
| b5137e1 | It had been a seven-year string of bad luck, ever since their parents died in that house fire. | Gordon Korman | ||
| 00d0f79 | Silver Shirts | James Ellroy | ||
| 19225ff | In the gravedigger scene in act V, Hamlet looks upon an anonymous skull and jokes that even Alexander the Great decomposed into dust that could have been used to plug a beer barrel. But when Hamlet is shown this skull of his old friend Yorick, the prince becomes unspeakably sentimental and sad because he knew him. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| d278611 | But the first thing a present-day visitor notices is that it's exceedingly gay. A life-size, fully dressed Garfield stands on top of a giant shaft. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| bc1d0c2 | Lincoln, of course, was giggling at the moment of impact; Booth knowing the play Lincoln was watching by heart, chose a laugh Lin on purpose to dampen the noise of his Derringer's report. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| beefe6d | Congress was soon neck-deep in arrogant boobs whom Beaumarchais or Deane had promised high ranks and higher salaries. "Men cannot be engaged to quit their native country . . . in a cause which is not their own" is how Deane rationalized the incentives to Congress." -- | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 19358d0 | Ah, spring. May 1778, specifically. Coming up on cannon weather. But then who needs to pay for gunpowder when heatstroke kills for free? | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 32a8512 | Earlier yet, in 1917, an amateur geologist named Albert E. Knapp claimed to have found a fossilized human footprint from the Triassic period--the imprint of a shoe made of stitched dinosaur hide. This led him to believe that humans and dinosaurs had coexisted in Nevada's Great Basin 200 million years ago. The New York Times took Knapp's finding somewhat seriously, as did Nobel Prize-winning Oxford scientist Frederick Soddy, who used it to s.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| ec5e94a | To establish such a forthright dream of decency, who wouldn't sign up to shoot at a few thousand Englishmen, just as long as Mr. Bean wasn't among them? | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 1906205 | Enter Henry Knox. The twenty-five-year-old bookworm approached Washington and volunteered to go to Fort Ticonderoga to fetch the equipment. Washington approved the cockamamie mission. And so, that November Knox and his brother set off for New York. Who knew they would return in January with forty-three cannons, fourteen mortars, and two howitzers dragged across frozen rivers and over the snowy Berkshire Mountains on custom sleds. The is the.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| fd7e38b | Between the Stamp Act of 1765 and Lexington a decade later, one of the colonists' most widespread tools of resistance against arbitrary taxation without representation was boycotting British imports, particularly luxury items. While the melodrama of hucking crates of tea into Boston Harbor continues to inspire civic-minded hotheads to this day, it's worth remembering the hordes of stoic colonial women who simply swore off tea and steeped ba.. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 3715b51 | Has our enslavement to dopamine--to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak--made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 8bd9d15 | If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation. | Sarah Vowell | ||
| 3dfeeb9 | and a thick mustache calmly gestured for them to get in. Amy | Gordon Korman | ||
| c6204af | Dan shrugged. "Maybe when you're rich, shopping takes longer, since you get to buy more stuff." | Gordon Korman | ||
| 057c16d | 173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one," wrote Jefferson in 1785 in his Notes on the State of Virginia. "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for."31" | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 5131d87 | it seemed likely to slide them back into the traditional status of servants or slaves, into the older world where labor was merely a painful necessity and not a source of prosperity. | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| aa2355f | republics required sufficient virtue in the character of their citizens to prevent corruption and eventual decay. | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 38b2f5f | As William Plumer of New Hampshire complained, "It is impossible to censure measures without condemning men." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 30cdc47 | Hamilton used the sinking fund to maintain the confidence of creditors in the government's securities; he had no intention of paying off the outstanding principal of the debt. Retiring the debt would only destroy its usefulness as money and as a means of attaching investors to the federal government. | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 913d22b | But what is worse than all," observed the English traveler Isaac Weld, "these wretches in their combat endeavor to their utmost to tear out each other's testicles."31" | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 49a5630 | Nevertheless, some Southerners like James Monroe still had serious reservations about the compromise, believing that assumption would reduce "the necessity for State taxation" and thus would "undoubtedly leave the national government more at liberty to exercise its powers and increase the subjects on which it will act." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| db8ffef | Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was diverted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy. | self-government | Gordon S. Wood | |
| 4dd863a | Realizing the extent to which people in the past struggled with circumstances that they scarcely understood is perhaps the most important insight flowing from historical study. To understand the past in all its complexity is to acquire historical wisdom and humility and indeed a tragic sense of life. A tragic sense does not mean a sad or pessimistic sense of life; it means a sense of the limitations of life. | GordonS. Wood | ||
| c262b42 | Yet the Pennsylvania radicals continued to assault judges for their abuse of discretionary authority."Judges," the popular radicals contended in 1807,"very often discover that the law, as written, may be made to mean something which the legislature never thought of. The greatest part of their decisions are in fact, and in effect, making new laws." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 672640f | Private associations of men for the purpose of promoting arts, sciences, benevolence or charity are very laudable," declared Noah Webster, but associations formed for political purposes were "dangerous to good government." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 11edbae | These critics thought that the general commercialization of English life, including the rise of trading companies, banks, stock markets, speculators, and new moneyed men, had undermined traditional values and threatened England with ruin. The monarchy and its minions had used patronage, the national debt, and the Bank of England to corrupt the society, including the House of Commons, and to build up the executive bureaucracy at the expense .. | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 7218fa2 | In 1788 Dr. Rush had told the clergy that, whatever their doctrinal differences, "you are all united in inculcating the necessity of morals," and "from the success or failure of your exertions in the cause of virtue, we anticipate the freedom or slavery of our country." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 7a2e38c | Do not give to persons able to work for a living," declared a critic of the traditional paternalistic charity in 1807. "Do not support widows who refuse to put out their children. Do not let the means of support be made easier to one who does not work than to those who do." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 18ab510 | Consequently, as Samuel Chase pointed out in the Maryland ratifying convention, the states would end up "without power, or respect and despised--they will sink into nothing, and be absorbed in the general government." Some Federalists actually hoped for this to happen--for the states eventually to be reduced to mere administrative units of the national government." | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 698c8f5 | James Wilkinson, an ex-Revolutionary War officer, and tried to convince them that the future of Americans in the West belonged to Spain. Spain offered trading licenses to Kentucky settlers, negotiated with leaders in Tennessee, and sought to attract Americans to settle in Spanish territory. Spain even enlisted Wilkinson as a paid agent of its government. Wilkinson secretly swore allegiance to the Spanish crown and for fifteen years received.. | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| accf4b3 | The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy. | Alfred North Whitehead | ||
| 222f85f | The land north of the Ohio River and west of the Appalachians was to be surveyed and marked off in a rectangular pattern--with east-west baselines and north-south ranges--before any of it was sold. This territory was to be divided into townships six miles square, with each township in turn cut up into thirty-six numbered sections of 640 acres each. Land was to be sold at auction, but the minimum price was set at one dollar per acre, and no .. | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| bc67a63 | The advice part of the Senate's role in treaty making was dropped.125 When the president issued his Proclamation of Neutrality in 1793, he did not bother to ask for the consent of the Senate, and he thus further established the executive as the dominant authority in the conduct of foreign affairs. | Gordon S. Wood | ||
| 9fa9a1f | With every ordinary person now being told that his ideas and tastes, on everything from medicine to art and government, were as good as if not better than those of "connoisseurs" and "speculative men" who were "college learnt," it is not surprising that truth and knowledge, which had seemed so palpable and attainable to the enlightened late eighteenth century, now became elusive and difficult to pin down.65 As popular knowledge came to seem.. | Gordon S. Wood |