Nathaniel Philbrick · 466 pages
Rating: (8.1K votes)
“We interact with one another as individuals responding to a complex haze of factors: professional responsibilities, personal likes and dislikes, ambition, jealousy, self-interest, and, in at least some instances, genuine altruism. Living in the here and now, we are awash with sensations of the present, memories of the past, and expectations and fears for the future. Our actions are not determined by any one cause; they are the fulfillment of who we are at that particular moment. After that moment passes, we continue to evolve, to change, and our memories of that moment inevitably change with us as we live with the consequences of our past actions, consequences we were unaware of at the time.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Faint heart never won fair lady,” he wrote; “neither did it ever pursue and overtake an Indian village.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Odd things happen in a battle, and the human heart has strange and gruesome depths and the human brain still stranger shallows;”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Living in the here and now, we are awash with sensations of the present, memories of the past, and expectations and fears for the future. Our actions are not determined by any one cause; they are the fulfillment of who we are at that particular moment. After that moment passes, we continue to evolve, to change, and our memories of that moment inevitably change with us as we live with the consequences of our past actions, consequences we were unaware of at the time.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Custer wrote, “I often think I would greatly prefer to cast my lot among those of my people adhered to the free open plains rather than submit to the confined limits of a reservation, there to be the recipient of the blessed benefits of civilization, with its vices thrown in without stint or measure.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, “All mortal greatness is but disease.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“fluidity of the sea, not the rigidity of irresistible law, characterizes human conduct, especially in the midst of a calamity.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“If half of the two thousand warriors fired ten arrows each during the engagement, that would have been a total of ten thousand arrows,”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Over the next hundred years, more gold would be extracted from a single mine in the Black Hills (an estimated $1 billion) than from any other mine in the continental United States.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Soon after, Tom, all of twenty years old, became the only soldier in the Civil War to win two Medals of Honor. In”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“I’ve always known that I had the happy facility of making enemies of any one I ever knew,”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“a space of time is a great breeder of myths.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“When an enlisted man sees his commanding officer lose his head entirely…,” Private Taylor wrote, “it would…demoralize anyone taught to breathe, almost, at the word of command.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Hindsight has a way of corrupting people’s memories, inviting them to view a past event not as it actually occurred but as they wished it had occurred given the ultimate result.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“Custer did not drink; he didn’t have to. His emotional effusions unhinged his judgment in ways that went far beyond alcohol’s ability to interfere with clear thinking.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
“The future is never more important than to a people on the verge of a cataclysm.”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, quote from The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Nathaniel Philbrick
Born place: in Boston, The United States
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“I do know, dividing our energies among a thousand what-ifs instead of concentrating them for the one sure next-step is a kind of self-sabotage. It’s not what we do next week, it’s what we do next that counts most.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Falling Free
“It was as if I'd already left some time before and was just catching up with myself.”
― Richard Ford, quote from Canada
“Enchanted islands are hard to understand,' he said. 'I've always thought that. It worried me even as a child. The trouble is that you can never be sure where the enchantment begins and where it ends.”
― Robert Aickman, quote from The Wine-Dark Sea
“One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse; or that when you make some great mistake, it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.”
― Winston S. Churchill, quote from Churchill: The Power of Words
“When he set her feet on the ground, she did not move her hands from his shoulders right away, but looked at him with a winsome expression. His breath came fast and hard, and he wished once more they could be alone and he could just kiss her and see what happened.”
― Kim Vogel Sawyer, quote from Waiting for Summer's Return
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