Lesley Hazleton · 239 pages
Rating: (5K votes)
“Assassination creates an instant hero of its target. Any past sins are not just forgiven but utterly forgotten.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“Man journeys in darkness, and his destiny journeys toward him,” he said, and traveled on.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“If there was a single moment it all began, it was that of Muhammad's death. Even the Prophet was mortal. That was the problem. It was as though nobody had considered the possibility that he might die, not even Muhammad himself.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“In Shia lore, Fatima lives on in another dimension to witness her sons’ suffering and to weep for them. She is the Holy Mother, whose younger son would sacrifice himself to redeem humanity just as had the son of that other great mother, Mary. Like her, Fatima is often called the Virgin as a sign of her spiritual purity. Like her, she will mourn her offspring until the Day of Judgment,”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“Arabic is a subtle and sinuous language. Like all Semitic languages, it plays on words, taking a three-consonant root and building on it to create what sometimes seems an infinite number of meanings. Even the exact same word can have different connotations, depending on the context. Perhaps the best-known example is jihad, struggle, which can be either the inner striving to live the Islamic life and attain a higher level of spiritual consciousness, or the external armed confrontation with those seen as enemies of Islam.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“Arabia would not exert political power again for more than a thousand years, until the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect emerged from the central highlands in the eighteenth century to carry out violent raids against Shia shrines in Iraq and even against the holy places of Mecca and Medina.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“But raw numbers can be misleading. In the Middle East heartland of Islam, the Shia are closer to fifty percent, and wherever oil reserves are richest—Iran, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf coast, including eastern Saudi Arabia—they are in the majority.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“It was as though nobody had considered the possibility that he might die, not even Muhammad himself.”
― Lesley Hazleton, quote from After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split
“I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing...”
― Louise Glück, quote from The Wild Iris
“If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies. ”
― Paul Graham, quote from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
“Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees. Reminding us, that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations. Because we are imperfect beings who are self-blinded to the truth of the world’s stunning complexity, we shave reality to paper thin theories and ideologies that we can easily grasp – and we call them truths. But the truth of a sea in all it’s immensity cannot be embodied in one tidewashed pebble.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog
“It is possible to insult Americans?”
“They are automatically insulted and enraged,” said the young composer. “They form splenetic organizations by the hundreds, and write letters to periodicals and congressmen. They gather in mobs and pay no attention. They hang people without trial and shoot citizens down with machine guns out of passing cars. They will despise you because you do not eat the same things they eat for breakfast. They even apply indifference.”
― Walter Van Tilburg Clark, quote from The City Of Trembling Leaves
“What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody who wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.”
― D.H. Lawrence, quote from The Complete Poems (Poetry Library)
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