“I thank God daily for the good fortune of my birth, for I am certain I would have made a miserable peasant.”
― C.S. Forester, quote from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower
“Clairvoyant, Hornblower could foresee that in a year's time, the world would hardy remember the incident. In twenty years, it would be entirely forgotten. Yet those headless corpses up there in Muzillac; those shattered redcoats; those Frenchmen caught in the four-pounder's blast of canister -- they were as dead as if it had been a day in which history had been changed.”
― C.S. Forester, quote from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower
“His self-respect was at its lowest ebb.”
― C.S. Forester, quote from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower
“Harm began to come to Hornblower from that day forth, despite his obedience to orders and diligent study of his duties, and it stemmed from the arrival in the midshipmen’s berth of John Simpson as senior warrant officer.”
― C.S. Forester, quote from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower
“July 4th, 1776,” mused Keene, reading Hornblower’s date of birth to himself.”
― C.S. Forester, quote from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower
C.S. Forester
Born place: in Cairo, Egypt
Born date December 13, 1901
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“Science is a grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out of ten, when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science? When they say criminology is a science? They mean getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect; in what they would call a dry impartial light; in what I should call a dead and dehumanized light. They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his “criminal skull” as if it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros’s nose. When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour. I don’t deny the dry light may sometimes do good; though in one sense it’s the very reverse of science. So far from being knowledge, it’s actually suppression of what we know. It’s treating a friend as a stranger, and pretending that something familiar is really remote and mysterious. It’s like saying that a man has a proboscis between the eyes, or that he falls down in a fit of insensibility once every twenty-four hours. Well, what you call “the secret” is exactly the opposite. I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside.”
― Oliver Sacks, quote from An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
“In New York the curriculum guide for 11th-grade American history tells students that there were three "foundations" for the Constitution: the European Enlightenment, the "Haudenosaunee political system", and the antecedent colonial experience. Only the Haudenosaunee political system receives explanatory subheadings: "a. Influence upon colonial leadership and European intellectuals (Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau); b. Impact on Albany Plan of Union, Articles of Confederation, and U.S. Constitution".
How many experts on the American Constitution would endorse this stirring tribute to the "Haudenosaunee political system"? How many have heard of that system? Whatever influence the Iroquois confederation may have had on the framers of the Constitution was marginal; on European intellectuals it was marginal to the point of invisibility. No other state curriculum offers this analysis of the making of the Constitution. But then no other state has so effective an Iroquois lobby.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society
“This book is a labor of love. It is dedicated to people who have cried themselves to sleep because they were 'different'. It is also a celebration of the 'inner outcast' in all of us, and a humble attempt to inspire tolerance, understanding, and acceptance." the intro from the author”
― Jodee Blanco, quote from Please Stop Laughing at Me... One Woman's Inspirational Story
“Wealthier Mennonites even though they're not technically supposed to be wealthy do their drinking in North Dakota or Hawaii. They are sort of like rock bands on tour in that the rules of this town don't apply to them when they're on the road. An embarrassing situation for wealthy Mennonites is to meet other wealthy Mennonites at the swim-up bar at the Honolulu Holiday Inn.”
― Miriam Toews, quote from A Complicated Kindness
“And will knowing what she reads make you know who she is?”
“Can you think of a better way to tell?”
― Donna Leon, quote from The Death of Faith
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