179 quotes found
"Het is voor iemand als ik een heel eigenaardige gewaarwording om in een dagboek te schrijven. Niet alleen dat ik nog nooit geschreven heb, maar het komt me zo voor, dat later noch ik, noch iemand anders in de ontboezemingen van een dertienjarig schoolmeisje belang zal stellen."
"In de derde les werd het hem echter weer te bont. "Anne, als strafwerk voor praten, een opstel over het onderwerp 'Kwek, kwek, kwek, zei juffrouw Snaterbek'.""
"Maar één ding weet ik nu en dat is dit: je leert de mensen pas goed kennen, als je een keer echte ruzie met ze gemaakt hebt. Pas dan kan je hun karakter beoordelen!"
"Fraai volk, de Duitsers. En daar behoorde ik ook eens toe!"
"Als ik een boek lees, dat indruk op me maakt, moet ik in mezelf grondig orde scheppen, alvorens me onder de mensen te begeven, anders zou men van mij denken dat ik een wat rare geest had."
"Een mens kan eenzaam zijn ondanks de liefde van velen, want voor niemand is hij toch "de liefste"."
"Ik sus mijn geweten nu maar met de gedachte, dat scheldwoorden beter op papier kunnen staan dan dat moeder ze moet meedragen in haar hart."
"Wie zou weten, hoeveel er in een bakvisziel omgaat?"
"I’ve now reached the point where it doesn’t matter that much more to me anymore whether I die or whether I live on, the world will go on spinning without me and I can’t do anything to fight against these events anyway."
"Ik laat het er op aankomen en doe niets anders dan leren en op een goed einde hopen."
"Voor ieder die bang, eenzaam of ongelukkig is, is stellig het beste middel naar buiten te gaan, ergens waar hij helemaal alleen is, alleen met de hemel, de natuur en God. Want dan pas, dan alleen voelt men, dat alles is, zoals het zijn moet en dat God de mensen in de eenvoudige, maar mooie natuur gelukkig wil zien. Zolang dit bestaat en dat zal wel altijd zo zijn, weet ik, dat er in welke omstandigheden ook, een troost voor elk verdriet is. En ik geloof stellig, dat bij elke ellende de natuur veel ergs kan wegnemen."
"Men kan zeggen, je moet je mond houden, maar geen oordeel hebben bestaat niet. Niemand kan een ander zijn oordeel verbieden, al is die ander nog zo jong."
"Dan denk ik niet aan al de ellende, maar aan het mooie dat nog overblijft. Hierin ligt voor een groot deel het verschil tussen moeder en mij. Haar raad voor zwaarmoedigheid is: "Denk aan al de ellende in de wereld en wees blij, dat jij die niet beleeft!" Mijn raad is: "Ga naar buiten, naar de velden, de natuur en de zon, ga naar buiten en probeer het geluk in jezelf te hervinden en in God. Denk aan al het mooie dat er in en om jezelf nog overblijft en wees gelukkig!""
"Onder "eet-periodes" versta ik periodes waarin men niets anders te eten krijgt dan een bepaald gerecht of een bepaalde groente. Een tijdlang hadden we niets anders te eten dan elke dag andijvie met zand, zonder zand, stamppot, los en in de vuurvaste schotel, toen was het spinazie, daarna volgden koolrabie, schorseneren, komkommers, tomaten, zuurkool enzovoort enzovoort."
"Ik moet iets hebben naast man en kinderen waar ik me aan wijden kan! O ja, ik wil niet zoals de meeste mensen voor niets geleefd hebben. Ik wil van nut of plezier zijn voor de mensen, die om mij heen leven en die mij toch niet kennen."
"Ik wil nog voortleven ook na mijn dood! En daarom ben ik God zo dankbaar, dat hij me bij mijn geboorte al een mogelijkheid heeft meegegeven om me te ontwikkelen en om te schrijven, dus om uit te drukken alles wat in me is."
"Wees moedig! Laten we ons van onze taak bewust blijven en niet mopperen, er zal een uitkomst komen, God heeft ons volk nooit in de steek gelaten. Door alle eeuwen heen zijn er Joden blijven leven, door alle eeuwen heen moesten Joden lijden, maar door alle eeuwen heen zijn ze ook sterk geworden; de zwakken vallen, maar de sterken zullen overblijven en nooit ondergaan!"
"Ik geloof nooit dat de oorlog de schuld is alleen van de grote mannen, van de regeerders en kapitalisten. O neen, de kleine man doet het net zo goed graag, anders zouden de volkeren er toch al lang tegen in opstand zijn gekomen! Er is nu eenmaal in de mensen een drang tot vernieling, een drang tot doodslaan, tot vermoorden en razen en zolang de gehele mensheid, zonder uitzondering, geen grote metamorphose heeft ondergaan, zal de oorlog woeden, zal alles wat opgebouwd, aangekweekt en gegroeid is, weer geschonden en vernietigd worden, waarna de mensheid opnieuw moet beginnen."
"Ik ben vaak neerslachtig geweest, maar nooit wanhopig, ik beschouw dit onderduiken als een gevaarlijk avontuur, dat romantisch en interessant is. Ik beschouw elke ontbering als een amusement in mijn dagboek. Ik heb me nu eenmaal voorgenomen, dat ik een ander leven zal leiden dan andere meisjes en later een ander leven dan gewone huisvrouwen. Dit is het goede begin van het interessante en daarom, daarom alleen moet ik in de meest gevaarlijke ogenblikken lachen om het humoristische van de situatie."
"[Ik vind], dat er nog altijd iets moois overblijft, aan de natuur, de zonneschijn, de vrijheid, aan jezelf, daar heb je wat aan. Kijk daarnaar, dan vind je jezelf weer en God, dan word je evenwichtig. En wie gelukkig is, zal ook anderen gelukkig maken, wie moed en vertrouwen heeft, zal nooit in de ellende ondergaan!"
"“Which books are ruined?” I asked Margot, who was going through my library of treasures. “Algebra,” Margot said. I hurried over for a look, but unfortunately the algebra book had not been destroyed completely too."
"En begint er nog tijdens dat gevecht al tweedracht te komen, is toch de Jood weer minder dan de ander? O het is treurig, heel erg treurig, dat weer voor de zoveelste maal de oude wijsheid bevestigd is: "Wat één Christen doet, moet hijzelf verantwoorden, wat één Jood doet, valt op alle Joden terug.""
"[...] let the end come, even if it is hard, then at least we’ll know whether we will win out in the end or go under."
"Ik geloof dat het inzicht, dat het de plicht van de vrouw is dat zij kinderen krijgt, zich in de loop van de volgende eeuw wel zal veranderen en plaats zal maken voor waardering en bewondering voor haar, die zonder mopperen en grote woorden de lasten op haar schouders neemt!"
"Luiheid mag aantrekkelijk schijnen, werken geeft bevrediging."
"Wij leven allen, maar weten niet waarom en waarvoor, wij leven allen met het doel gelukkig te worden, we leven allen verschillend en toch gelijk."
"Dat is het moeilijke in deze tijd: idealen, dromen, mooie verwachtingen komen nog niet bij ons op of ze worden door de gruwelijke werkelijkheid getroffen en zo totaal verwoest. Het is een groot wonder, dat ik niet al mijn verwachtingen heb opgegeven, want ze lijken absurd en onuitvoerbaar. Toch houd ik ze vast, ondanks alles, omdat ik nog steeds aan de innerlijke goedheid van den mens geloof. Het is me ten enenmale onmogelijk alles op te bouwen op de basis van dood, ellende en verwarring. Ik zie hoe de wereld langzaam steeds meer in een woestijn herschapen wordt, ik hoor steeds harder de aanrollende donder, die ook ons zal doden, ik voel het leed van millioenen mensen mee en toch, als ik naar de hemel kijk, denk ik, dat alles zich weer ten goede zal wenden, dat ook deze hardheid zal ophouden, dat er weer rust en vrede in de wereldorde zal komen. Intussen moet ik mijn denkbeelden hoog en droog houden, in de tijden die komen zijn ze misschien toch nog uit te voeren."
"Ouders kunnen alleen raad of goede aanwijzingen meegeven, de uiteindelijke vorming van iemands karakter ligt in zijn eigen hand."
"Vergeef me, ik heb niet voor niets de naam een bundeltje tegenspraak te zijn!"
"Where there's hope, there's life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again."
"We took her in, but she was not as pleasant a tenant as the fat gentleman had been. To start with she was very sloppy and tossed her things all around, and secondly, and this was the main thing, she had a fiancé who often drank too much and that was not very pleasant to have around the house. One night, for example, we awoke with a start at the sound of the doorbell and when my father answered it he found the drunken fiancé, who slapped him on the shoulder and kept repeating: “We’re good friends! Yes, we are good friends!” Boom... the door was slammed in his face."
"All people are born equal, all people die in the end and keep nothing of their worldly status. All riches, all power and all greatness exist only for so few years, why then is that mortality clung to so strongly?"
"We all know that a good example is more effective than advice. So set a good example, and it won't take long for others to follow."
"How wonderful it is that no one has to wait, but can start right now to gradually change the world! How wonderful it is that everyone, great and small, can immediately help bring about justice by giving of themselves! [...] You can always — always — give something, even if it's a simple act of kindness!"
"No one has ever become poor by giving. If you act that way, then after a few generations people will no longer have to feel sorry for child beggars, because there will no longer be any!"
"Who knows, perhaps one day people will listen more to “the little piece of God”, which we call a conscience, than to their own desires!."
"Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!"
"Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness."
"Anne Frank is each of us, and beyond what each of us is and will be. Her diary does not contain photographs of trains pulling into the last smoke-filled station. She dared to speak of springtime's light, and the body of a girl becoming a woman. I like Anne Frank because she was no more nor less than ourselves, a schoolgirl. She spoke of awakening to excitement, of the rain in Europe. Even so, there was something more in Anne, beyond that first innocence, as if she were submerged in transparencies."
"(Have you related to any other stories of children or adolescents, of young people growing up?) There was The Catcher in the Rye, the Diary of Ann Frank... Yes, actually I have, definitely."
"Anne Frank's legacy is still very much alive and it can address us fully, especially at a time when the map of the world is changing and when dark passions are awakening within people."
"Here's how much people love dead Jews: Anne Frank's diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 via her surviving father, Otto Frank, has been translated into seventy languages and has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and the Anne Frank House now hosts well over a million visitors each year"
"Of the multitude who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank."
"One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way: If we were capable of taking in the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live."
"Some of us read Anne Frank's diary on Robben Island and derived much encouragement of it."
"Gail Horalek, the mother of a 7th-grade child in Michigan in the US, has made international headlines by complaining that the unabridged version of Anne Frank's diary is pornographic and should not be taught at her daughter's school. At issue for Horalek is a section detailing Anne's exploration of her own genitalia, material originally omitted by Anne's father, Otto Frank, when he prepared the manuscript for publication in the late 40s I had to look up what age kids are in the 7th grade. They're 12 to 13! They're only about a year younger than Anne was when she wrote of her vagina: "There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can't imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!" There cannot be a 13-year-old girl on the planet who hasn't had a root around and arrived at this exact stage of bafflement."
"Horalek is, of course, wrong to call the passages pornographic. Pornography is material intended to arouse sexual excitement, and I very much doubt that was Anne's intention when she wrote to her imaginary confidant Kitty about her journeys of self-discovery."
"Anne is going through puberty, and she describes her changed vagina in honest detail, saying, "until I was 11 or 12, I didn't realise there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn't see them. What's even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris." (Oh Anne, we've all been there.) She continues: "In the upper part, between the outer labia, there's a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That's the clitoris." It's beautiful, visceral writing, and it's describing something that most young women experience. And yet I can understand that the junior Ms Horalek would have squirmed and wished herself elsewhere when this was read in class. We live in a society in which young women are taught to be ashamed of the changes that their bodies undergo at puberty – to be secretive about them, and even to pretend that they don't exist. Breasts, the minute they bud, are strapped into harnesses, and the nipples disguised from view. Period paraphernalia must be discreet, with advertisers routinely boasting that their tampons look enough like sweets to circumvent the social horror of discovery. For my generation, removal of post-pubescent hair on the legs and underarms was mandatory. For Ms Horalek's generation, it is mandatory for pubic hair too. Anne writes: "When you're standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you're standing, so you can't see what's inside." How must reading this feel for pubescent girls who've already internalised the message that they must spend the rest of their lives maintaining the illusion that their body hair doesn't exist."
"Dealing with this discomfort only involves censoring Anne Frank's diary if you're quite, quite odd. For the rest of us, the answer might be a little more free-flowing boob, some brazen Mooncup sterilisation, hairy legs sprinting through the summer grasses and, to use a pun that is intended as the highest compliment, Frankness about masturbation, sexuality and our bodies. Because it isn't just the Horaleks of this world who teach girls to be shameful rather than celebratory."
"Animals only follow their natural instincts; but man, unless he has experienced the influence of learning and philosophy, is at the mercy of impulses that are worse than those of a wild beast. There is no beast more savage and dangerous than a human being who is swept along by the passions of ambition, greed, anger, envy, extravagance, and sensuality."
"No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side."
"I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults."
"A constant element of enjoyment must be mingled with our studies, so that we think of learning as a game rather than a form of drudgery, for no activity can be continued for long if it does not to some extent afford pleasure to the participant."
"You must acquire the best knowledge first, and without delay; it is the height of madness to learn what you will later have to unlearn."
"Do not be guilty of possessing a library of learned books while lacking learning yourself."
"Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque ut pecuniam accepero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam."
"In regione caecorum rex est luscus."
"The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war."
"Bis dat, qui cito dat."
"There are monasteries where there is no discipline, and which are worse than brothels — ut prae his lupanaria sint et magis sobria et magis pudica. There are others where religion is nothing but ritual; and these are worse than the first, for the Spirit of God is not in them, and they are inflated with self-righteousness. There are those, again, where the brethren are so sick of the imposture that they keep it up only to deceive the vulgar. The houses are rare indeed where the rule is seriously observed, and even in these few, if you look to the bottom, you will find small sincerity. But there is craft, and plenty of it — craft enough to impose on mature men, not to say innocent boys; and this is called profession. Suppose a house where all is as it ought to be, you have no security that it will continue so. A good superior may be followed by a fool or a tyrant, or an infected brother may introduce a moral plague. True, in extreme cases a monk may change his house, or even may change his order, but leave is rarely given. There is always a suspicion of something wrong, and on the least complaint such a person is sent back."
"I have no patience with those who say that sexual excitement is shameful and that venereal stimuli have their origin not in nature, but in sin. Nothing is so far from the truth. As if marriage, whose function cannot be fulfilled without these incitements, did not rise above blame. In other living creatures, where do these incitements come from? From nature or from sin? From nature, of course. It must borne in mind that in the apetites of the body there is very little difference between man and other living creatures. Finally, we defile by our imagination what of its own nature is fair and holy. If we were willing to evaluate things not according to the opinion of the crowd, but according to nature itself, how is it less repulsive to eat, chew, digest, evacuate, and sleep after the fashion of dumb animals, than to enjoy lawful and permitted carnal relations?"
"I am a lover of liberty. I will not and I cannot serve a party."
"There is no doubt about Martin Luther's marriage, but the rumour about his wife's early confinement is false; she is said however to be pregnant now. If there is truth in the popular legend, that Antichrist will be born from a monk and a nun (which is the story these people keep putting about), how many thousands of Antichrists the world must have already!"
"The world thought well of my schoolmaster guardian, because he was neither a liar, nor a scamp, nor a gambler; but he was coarse, avaricious, and ignorant; he knew nothing beyond the confused lessons which he taught to his classes. He imagined that in forcing a youth to become a monk he would be offering a sacrifice acceptable to God. He used to boast of the many victims which he devoted annually to Dominic and Francis and Benedict."
"Wherever you encounter truth, look upon it as Christianity."
"There is nothing I congratulate myself on more heartily than on never having joined a sect."
"I am a citizen of the world, known to all and to all a stranger."
"I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people."
"For we have in Latin only a few small streams and muddy puddles, while they have pure springs and rivers flowing in gold. I see that it is utter madness even to touch with the little finger that branch of theology that deals chiefly with the divine mysteries, unless one is also provided with the equipment of Greek."
"Most Christians are superstitious rather than pious, and except for the name of Christ differ hardly at all from superstitious pagans."
"Whatever you see in the more material part of yourself, learn to refer to God and to the invisible part of yourself. In that way, whatever offers itself to the senses will become for you an occasion for the practice of piety."
"You venerate the saints, and you take pleasure in touching their relics. But you disregard their greatest legacy, the example of a blameless life. No devotion is more pleasing to Mary than the imitation of Mary's humility. No devotion is more acceptable and proper to the saints than striving to imitate their virtues."
"For what is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?"
"This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind."
"It might be wiser for me to avoid Camarina and say nothing of theologians. They are a proud, susceptible race. They will smother me under six hundred dogmas. They will call me heretic and bring thunderbolts out of their arsenals, where they keep whole magazines of them for their enemies. Still they are Folly's servants, though they disown their mistress. They live in the third heaven, adoring their own persons and disdaining the poor crawlers upon earth. They are surrounded with a bodyguard of definitions, conclusions, corollaries, propositions explicit, and propositions implicit. ...They will tell you how the world was created. They will show you the crack where Sin crept in and corrupted mankind."
"They [the theologians] will explain to you how Christ was formed in the Virgin's womb; how accident subsists in synaxis without domicile in place. The most ordinary of them can do this. Those more fully initiated explain further whether there is an instans in Divine generation; whether in Christ there is more than a single filiation; whether 'the Father hates the Son' is a possible proposition; whether God can become the substance of a woman, of an ass, of a pumpkin, or of the devil, and whether, if so, a pumpkin could preach a sermon, or work miracles, or be crucified. And they can discover a thousand other things to you besides these. They will make you understand notions, and instants, formalities, and quiddities, things which no eyes ever saw, unless they were eyes which could see in the dark what had no existence."
"Of how much more passion than reason has Jupiter composed us? putting in, as one would say, "scarce half an ounce to a pound.""
"Let me mention another requirement for a better understanding of Holy Scripture. I would suggest that you read those commentators who do not stick so closely to the literal sense. The ones I would recommend most highly after St. Paul himself are Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. Too many of our modern theologians are prone to a literal interpretation, which they subtly misconstrue. p.37"
"In this life it is necessary that we be on our guard. To begin with we must be constantly aware of the fact that life here below is best described as being a type of continual warfare. This is a fact that Job, that undefeated soldier of vast experience, tells us so plainly. Yet in this matter the great majority of mankind is often deceived, for the world, like some deceitful magician, captivates their minds with seductive blandishments, and as a result most individuals behave as if there had been a cessation of hostilities. p.61"
"The things that we can see with our physical eyes are mere shadows of reality. If they appear ugly and ill formed, then what must be the ugliness of the soul in sin, deprived of all light? The soul, like the body, can undergo transformation in appearance. In sin it appears as completely ugly to the beholder. In virtue it shines resplendently before God."
"Like the body the soul can be healthy, youthful, and so on. It can undergo pain, thirst, and hunger. In this physical life, that is, in the visible world, we avoid whatever would defile or deform the body; how much more, then, ought we to avoid that which would tarnish the soul?"
"I feel that the entire spiritual life consists in this: That we gradually turn from those things whose appearance is deceptive to those things that are real. p. 63"
"Once we have tasted the sweetness of what is spiritual, the pleasures of the world will have no attraction for us. If we disregard the shadows of things, then we will penetrate their inner substance."
"You worry whether the drought will end. It is far better that you pray that God may water your mind lest virtue wither away in it. You are greatly concerned with money that is lost or being wasted, or you worry about the advance of old age. I think it much to be desired that you provide first of all for the needs of your soul."
"Origen, of course, is also a great advocate of the allegorical approach. Yet I think you will have to admit that our modem theologians either despise this method of interpretation or are completely ignorant of it. As a matter of fact they surpass the pagans of antiquity in the subtlety of their distinctions. p. 63"
"Anyone who actually admires money as the most precious thing in life, and rests his security on it to the extent of believing that as long as he possesses it he will be happy, has fashioned too many false gods for himself. Too many people put money in the place of Christ, as if it alone has the key to their happiness or unhappiness. p. 100"
"The worst evil is hardness of heart. Those who do not repent, who deliberately remain in their habits of sin, have the most to fear. p. 146"
"Careful thought about this will reveal how few there are who are truly converted from evil habits, especially among those who have prolonged their lives of sin right up to the end. The path down to evil is quick, slippery, and easy. But to turn and “to go forth to the upper air . . . this is effort, this is toil.” Think of Aesop’s goat before you descend and remember that climbing out is not easy. p. 147"
"Not to be a proud and haughty person, you have to follow the old proverb and “know thyself.” That is to say, you must regard your special talents, whatever beauty or fame you have, as gifts from God, and not as things you earned for yourself. Whatever is low and mean is not God’s doing, however. Here you can only blame yourself. Remember the squalor of your birth and how naked and poor you were when you crawled into the light of day like a little animal. p.154"
"Though I certainly deserve no ill treatment from mortals, yet if the insults and repulses I receive were attended with any advantage to them, I would content myself with lamenting in silence my own unmerited indignities and man's injustice."
"This world, the whole of the planet called earth, is the common country of all who live and breathe upon it."
"Among the celestial bodies that are revolving over our heads, though the motions are not the same, and though the force is not equal, yet they move, and ever have moved, without clashing, and in perfect harmony."
"The very elements themselves, though repugnant in their nature, yet, by a happy equilibrium, preserve eternal peace; and amid the discordancy of their constituent principles, cherish, by a friendly intercourse and coalition, an uninterrupted concord."
"In living bodies, how all the various limbs harmonize, and mutually combine, for common defence against injury! What can be more heterogeneous, and unlike, than the body and the soul? and yet with what strong bonds nature has united them, is evident from the pang of separation. As life itself is nothing else but the concordant union of body and soul, so is health the harmonious cooperation of all the parts and functions of the body."
"Animals destitute of reason live with their own kind in a state of social amity. Elephants herd together; sheep and swine feed in flocks; cranes and crows take their flight in troops; storks have their public meetings to consult previously to their emigration, and feed their parents when unable to feed themselves; dolphins defend each other by mutual assistance; and everybody knows, that both ants and bees have respectively established by general agreement, a little friendly community."
"But plants, though they have not powers of perception, yet, as they have life, certainly approach very nearly to those things which are endowed with sentient faculties. What then is so completely insensible as stony substance? yet even in this, there appears to be a desire of union. Thus the loadstone attracts iron to it, and holds it fast in its embrace, when so attracted. Indeed, the attraction of cohesion, as a law of love, takes place throughout all inanimate nature."
"I need not repeat, that the most savage of the savage tribes in the forest, live among each other in amity. Lions show no fierceness to the lion race. The boar does not brandish his deadly tooth against his brother boar. The lynx lives in peace with the lynx. The serpent shews no venom in his intercourse with his fellow serpent; and the loving kindness of wolf to wolf is proverbial."
"As Christ had recommended peace during the whole of his life, mark with what anxiety he enforces it at the approach of his dissolution. Love one another, says he; as I have loved you, so love one another; and again, my peace I give unto you, my peace I leave you. Do you observe the legacy he leaves to those whom he loves? Is it a pompous retinue, a large estate, or empire? Nothing of this kind. What is it then? Peace he giveth, his peace he leaveth; peace, not only with our near connections, but with enemies and strangers!"
"As to the people; in all these countries the greater part of the people certainly detest war, and most devoutly wish for peace. A very few of them, indeed, whose unnatural happiness depends upon the public misery, may wish for war; but be it yours to decide, whether it is equitable or not, that the unprincipled selfishness of such wretches should have more weight than the anxious wishes of all good men united."
"Let the public good overcome all private and selfish regards of every kind and degree; though in truth, even private and selfish regards, and every man's own interest, will be best promoted by the preservation of peace."
"Finally, every man will become dear and pleasing to every other man; all will be beloved by all! and, what is still more desirable, beloved also by Christ; to become acceptable to whom is the highest felicity of human nature."
"We must learn how to imitate Cicero from Cicero himself. Let us imitate him as he imitated others."
"A speech comes alive only if it rises from the heart, not if it floats on the lips."
"Dulce bellum inexpertis."
"Erasmus’s Moria … sees through the madness of those who see themselves as reasonable and self-possessed while in reality giving themselves over to rivalry."
"What is unique about Folly’s mode of truth is its positionality: it comes “not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.” Folly’s truth entails “a kind of ek-stasis, a being outside oneself, being beside oneself, a state in which truth is known (and spoken) from a position that does not know itself to be the position of truth.”"
"As a representative of both the feminine and the parodic, Moria does not set out to expose or destroy social conventions: her wisdom lies in working with them, without being ruled by them."
"What is the position of someone who sees behind the masks, but refuses to expose them violently? … The Praise of Folly marks out such a position, ‘prudently disarming itself in advance, keeping its phallus the size of the woman’s, steering clear of the play of power, clear of politics.’"
"Erasmus dramatizes a well-established political position: that of the fool who claims license to criticize all and sundry without reprisal, since his madness defines him as not fully a person and therefore not a political being with political desires and ambitions. The Praise of Folly, therefore sketches the possibility of a position for the critic of the scene of political rivalry, a position not simply impartial between the rivals but also, by self-definition, off the stage of rivalry altogether."
"Erasmus advises students to read only the best books on the subjects with which they are occupied. He cautions them against loading their memories with the errors of inferior writers which they will afterwards have to throw off and forget. The best description of the state of Europe in the age immediately preceding the Reformation will be found in the correspondence of Erasmus himself. I can promise my own readers that if they will accept Erasmus for a guide in that entangled period, they will not wander far out of the way."
"I am going to speak to you this evening about the 'Encomium Moriæ,' if not the most remarkable, yet the most effective of all Erasmus's writings. It originated... in his conversations with More at Chelsea. ...and the title is a humorous play on More's own name."
"Folly, Moria, speaks in her own name and declares herself the frankest of beings. The jester of the age was often the wisest man; the so called wise men were often the stupidest of blockheads: and the play of wit goes on from one aspect to the other, the ape showing behind the purple, and the ass under the lion's skin."
"Meanwhile rational Europe, trying to keep inflammable passion and mad peasant blood within decent bounds, had lost its great spokesman in Erasmus. He died in April. The torch of good reason was for the moment dimmed. Two firebrands, still obscure, were planning the conquest of mankind for a Christ of their own making, each asking his followers to immolate their reason and to bind their will. In 1536 John Calvin published his Institutio. In the same year a Spanish Basque, to be known as Ignatius Loyola, was finishing the studies at Paris that underlay the Society of Jesus. Henry's 'moderation,' on the terms of his own dominance, would push half-evolved Europeans along the road of the modern state, while Calvin and Loyola, borrowing statecraft and rousing the lust of warfare with the breath of the Eternal, would stir in religion precisely the same appetite for earthly dominance. Beside them Erasmus might seem a feeble creature, sitting by his open fire with a glass of Burgundy in front of him. But Erasmus had made the New Testament his labour of love. He was not a hero, like Loyola or Calvin. He was not an 'emperor' as Henry now called himself. He was only a humanist. Beside him the Jesuits, affirming liberty and vowing obedience, or the Calvinists, affirming predestination and applying the scourge, recalled very ancient priesthoods and glorious savage instincts that cry from the caverns to be released even if they must carry a Bible in their hand. Yet the Galilean Jew could not have despised the humanist: if he had rested by the fire with Erasmus, this book of the New Testament on his knees, and a glass of Burgundy before him, perhaps he might have raised those sad eyes to see that truth and charity had lingered for an instant at Basle, finding an honest welcome there that the Word was still alive; that the arm of the law and the methods of torture, to which his own thin hands bore witness, were perhaps not the only ways to prize the divinity in man."
"Here again you confuse and mix everything up in your usual way."
"The awareness of the all-surpassing importance of social groups is now general property in America."
"Educators are aware that they can reach the youth only by making use of gang spirit and guiding it, not by working against it."
"Revolution as an ideal concept always preserves the essential content of the original thought: sudden and lasting betterment."
"These are strange times. Reason, which once combatted faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution."
"History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated."
"The practices that led to the formation of the spontaneous order have much in common with rules observed in playing a game. To attempt to trace the origin of competition in play would lead us too far astray, but we can learn much from the masterly and revealing analysis of the role of play in the evolution of culture by the historian Johan Huizinga, whose work has been insufficiently appreciated by students of human order."
"It was, as we know, not so much eradicated as replaced by a Communist orthodoxy after 1949. And when this orthodoxy began to lose its grip on the Chinese public after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, Chinese officials struggled to find a new set of beliefs to justify their monopoly on power. The ideological hybrid that followed Maoism was "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," a mixture of state capitalism with political authoritarianism."
"The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom."
"But, in the late twentieth century, it became more important to many leftists to save “Third World” culture, no matter how barbaric, from “neo-colonialism,” than to support equality and democracy. People on the left would defend brutal dictators (Castro, Mao, Pol Pot, Khomeini, et al.) simply because they opposed “Western imperialism.” As a result, all politics that were derived, no matter how loosely, from Marxism, lost credibility, and finally died in 1989. This was naturally a disaster for communists and socialists, but also for social democrats, for they had lost an ideological basis for their idealism. And, without idealism, politics becomes a form of accounting, a management of purely material interests."
"Obama is neither a socialist, nor a mere political accountant. He has some modest ideals, and may yet be an excellent president. But what is needed to revive liberal idealism is a set of new ideas on how to promote justice, equality and freedom in the world. Reagan, Thatcher, and Gorbachev, assisted in the end of an ideology, which once offered hope, and inspired real progress, but resulted in slavery and mass murder. We are still waiting for a new vision, which will lead to progress, but this time, we hope, without tyranny."
"Mechanics... was an axiomatic construction; and... its problem could be solved quantitatively by algebraic methods."
"Plato makes the cosmos a living being by investing the world-body with a world-soul."
"[The mathematical character of Descartes' physics lies in its methodological nature, namely, the] axiomatic structure of the whole system, in the establishment of indubitable foundations and the deduction of the phenomena."
"Classical mechanics is mathematical not only in the sense that it makes use of mathematical terms and methods for abbreviating arguments which might, if necessary, also be expressed in the language of everyday speech; it is so also in the much more stringent sense that its basic concepts are mathematical concepts, that mechanics itself is a mathematics."
"Modern science was born in the period beginning with Copernicus's work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543) and ending with Newton's Philosophia Naturalis Philosophiae Mathematica."
"It is pointed out convincingly by George Sarton in The Life of Science that the development of science, as contrasted with that of art, is cumulative and progressive. Every scientist is educated in the current knowledge of his age and, making use of all he has learned, attempts to add something of his own to the existing body of knowledge. For this reason it is essentially impossible to isolate his personal achievements from the total pattern of scientific development. It follows that one cannot write the scientific life story of an isolated scholar, but only the history of the branches of science in which he participated."
"In the course of the fifteenth century, the sexagesimal division of the radius, in terms of which cords and goniometrical line-segments were expressed, was generally superseded, though not immediately replaced, by a decimal system of positional notation. Instead, mathematicians sought to avoid fractions by taking the Radius equal to a number of units of length of the form {\displaystyle 10^{n}} {\displaystyle 10^{n}}...The first to apply this method was the German astronomer Regiomontanus... the second half of the sixteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth century... observed of a gradual development of this method of Regiomontanus into a complete system of decimal positional fractions. Yet none of the steps taken by... writers is comparable in importance and scope with the progress achieved by Stevin in his De Thiende."
"In opposition to Mach and his fellow positivists, Dijksterhuis felt it to be his historian's duty to regard the advance of science as an essentially continuous affair, whereas his equally firmly held conviction that the mathematical treatment of natural phenomena constitutes the essence of scientific method almost forced him to conceive of the origins of early modern science as a decisive break with the past. The inner tension that resulted from this unresolved dilemma is palpable in Dijksterhuis' pioneering Val en worp. Yet in his magisterial The Mechanization of the World Picture, written a quarter- century later, it is present in no lesser degree, although hidden much more deeply under the surface."
"The dangers inherent in the twentieth-century classifications of the ‘mechanistic’ are best illustrated by two important works from the early 1960s. Dijksterhuis’ classic work, The Mechanization of the World Picture, traces the history of the emergence of a concept by looking for antecedents of a modern notion of the ‘mechanistic’ in antiquity. His work illustrates the ways in which focus on the different senses of the term ‘mechanical’ affects the questions that are considered. Taking as a given that atomism is a ‘mechanistic’ theory, Dijksterhuis traces the prehistory, in antiquity, of ideas contributing to what came to be called a ‘mechanical’ world-view – the development of mathematical physics and corpuscular materialism – and scarcely considers the contributions made by the discipline of mechanics.6 Tellingly, he downplays the contribution of the machine analogy to the history he is writing, because of its incompatibility with atomism."
"Dijksterhuis distinguished five crucial years in the 16th and first half of the 17th century when modern science was born (Dijksterhuis 1950, p. 431):"
"So there is no single European people. There is no single all-embracing community of culture and tradition among, say, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Berlin and Belgrade. In fact, there are at least four communities: the Northern Protestant, the Latin Catholic, the Greek Orthodox, and the Muslim Ottoman. There is no single language - there are more than twenty. (...) There are no real European political parties (...). And most significantly of all: unlike the United States, Europe still does not have a common story."
"The clash between reason and Portuguese experience. Hooykaas' starting point is the intellectual challenge which, from the early 15th century onward, was posed by the discoveries of the Portuguese mariners... There follows an array of fascinating accounts of, and quotations from, works by contemporary authors who were compelled to face as facts numerous phenomena the ancients had been quite sure could not possibly be observed because they were bound not to exist. Examples are Aristotle's denial that the tropics could be inhabited; Ptolemy's mathematically derived conviction that all dry land is confined to part of the Northern Hemisphere, and so on. ...In Hooykaas' view we are witnessing here a birth of 'natural history' in the domain of the hard and given fact... The narrow world of sense-data to which the ancient natural philosophers had confined their all-too-rational speculations was now being blown to pieces. And this was not being done by fellow natural philosophers, but rather at the urging of scarcely literate sailors!"
"Knowledge may have been sought for its own sake or with a view to achieving certain practical improvements."
"Whether the medieval episode is being regarded as itself revolutionary or as an indispensable run-up to the Scientific Revolution or not even that, just about every historian of science keeps treating it as the immediate predecessor to whatever revolutionary things happened in the 17th century."
"In the first chapter of Genesis it is made evident that absolutely nothing, except God, has any claim to divinity; even the sun and the moon, supreme gods of the neighbouring peoples, are set in their places between the herbs and the animals and are brought into the service of mankind."
"Pascal scornfully said that simple workmen had been able to convince of error those great men that are called 'philosophers'. It was, then, these unlearned men... who were most ready to believe 'what they saw with their eyes and touched with their hands'."
"Our thesis now is that the Portuguese seafarers and scientists of the 15th and 16th centuries made an important contribution to the rise of modern science by unintentionally undermining the belief in scientific authorities and by strengthening the confidence in an empirical, natural, historical method."
"The Portuguese had undertaken their voyages towards the southern hemisphere in spite of the science of their day... they followed an irresistible urge, which went against their scientific and religious convictions."
"Perhaps there is no literature in Europe that mirrors so clearly as the Portuguese, the painful conflict in the minds of people who, on the one hand, by their humanistic education, not only knew better but also more uncritically admired, ancient learning than their medieval predecessors, and, who, on the other hand, in the same epoch, were confronted with abundant proofs of the insufficiency and fallibility of that same Antiquity."
"In... "The Portuguese Discoveries and the Rise of Modern Science", Prof. Hooykaas supported the thesis "That the Portuguese seafarers and scientists of the 15th and 16th centuries made an important contribution to the rise of modern science by unintentionally undermining the belief in scientific authorities and by strengthening the confidence in the empirical, natural-historic method". ...Prof. Hooykaas analyzed the meaning of "natural science" in Antquity and the Middle Ages... characterized by too great a confidence in human reason and a sacred respect for what the authorities in the ancient world had written. ...In 1956, Prof. Hooykaas had already affirmed that "the discovery of the New World caused many difficulties to naturalists and historians..." …botanical species of medical interest warned that Dioscorides and Galen had not known everything; ...Portuguese seamen had clarified many doubts and shown the existence of the antipodes etc.."
"As Hooykaas (1972, p. 101) argued, the pervasiveness of religion meant that for any idea to become socially acceptable, it made a huge difference whether it was resisted, tolerated, or sponsored by prevalent religious beliefs."
"Hooykaas (1972, p. 100) writes that especially commercial and industrial cities were intellectually dynamic, far more so than sleepy university towns. These cities also tended to be more tolerant of different religions and multilingual. Modern research has found that especially cities involved in Atlantic trade were institutionally dynamic."
"No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there."
"There are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our “human capital” in economic terms) to create something new, whether that’s a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.But there is also a second way to make money. That’s the rentier way: by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others’ expense, using his power to claim economic benefit."
"Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody who passed by pay. Today’s tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway."
"“Now until the end of Great Moghul rule, that is to say till the beginning of the eighteenth century, Ayodhya was the capital of one of the provinces of the Muslim empire in North India. In consequence, Hindu sects had few rights to defend in the city. Pilgrimage was tolerated, but the cream of the profits from it was taken by the Muslim rulers in the form of a tax on pilgrims. It was forbidden to build temples or monasteries of more than a certain dimension in the city, and the existing temples fell into decay and disappeared or were replaced by mosques. The latter took place with the temple on the supposed spot of Rama’s birth, dating from the early eleventh century. This small temple was replaced by a mosque, the Babri Masjid, in AD 1528, during the reign of the first Moghul emperor, Babur, a deed which was to have far-reaching consequences.”"
"“The oldest pieces of archaeological evidence are the black columns which remain from the old (Visnu) temple that was situated on the holy spot where Rama descended to earth (Janma-bhumi). This temple was destroyed by the first Mogul prince Babur in AD 1528 and replaced by a mosque which still exists. The following specimens of these pillars are known to exist: fourteen pillars were utilized by the builder Mir Baqi in the construction of the mosque and are still partly visible within it; two pillars were placed besides the grave of the Muslim saint Fazl Abbas alias Musa Ashikhan, who, according to oral tradition, incited Babur to demolish the Hindu temple. The grave and these two pillars (driven upside-down into the ground) are still shown in Ayodhya, a little south of the Kubertila. A seventeenth specimen is found in the new Janmasthana temple of the north of the Babur mosque. It is rather a door-jamb than a column.”"
"“Notwithstanding all the difficulties discussed above, the original location of the Janma-sthãna is comparatively certain since it seems to be attested by the location of the mosque built by Babur in the building of which materials of a previous Hindu temple were used and are still visible. The mosque is believed by general consensus to occupy the site of the Janmasthana. After the destruction of the original temple a new Janmasthana temple was built on the north side of the mosque separated from it by a street."
"“In conclusion we may say that there is evidence for the existence of five Vishnu temples in Ayodhya in the twelfth century. Harismriti (Guptahari) at the Gopratara ghat, (2) Vishnu-hari at the Chakratírtha ghat, (3) Chandrahari on the west side of the Svargadvãra ghats, (4) Dharmahari on east side of the Svargadvãra ghats, (5) a Visnu temple on the janmabhùmi. Three of these temples have been replaced by mosques and one was swept away by the Sarayù. The fate of the fifth is unknown but the site is occupied today by a new Guptahari Chakrahari temple.” (p. 54)"
"The original birthplace temple dated from the 10th or 11th century. Before its destruction the temple must have been one of the main pilgrimage centres of Ayodhya, _ especially on the occasion of Ramanwami .... The destruction of the temple would not have implied the end of all forms of worship in and around the holy site. Just as they do today,.. pilgrims may have assembled near the mosque to have darsan of the tihrtha, and in order to perform the puja special _ provisions may have been made ... .... The ritual of Ramanavami described in OA 22 (a recension of the Ayodhya Mahatmya), which is said to be carried out in the Janmasthan (OA 22.22), does not require a temple or the like and could therefore have been performed somewhere near the original holy spot in the 16th and following centuries. Such perseverance and flexibility of Hinduism under Muslim repression, which was demonstrated throughout the history of North India, could have provided an objective reason for the compiler of the OA recension not to delete or minimize his description of the Janamsthan despite its occupation by a mosque ..."
"About 250 m to the south-east of the Svargadvara mosque is [the] ruin of another masjid very similar to the former. The two mosques stand symmetrically on both sides of the main bathing ghats, which are collectively called Svargadvara. The eastern mosque, built at the same time as the other one, replaces an old Visnu temple built by the last Gahadavala king Jayacandra in AD 1184. An inscription found in the ruins of the mosque testifies to the construction of this Vaisnava temple."
"In conclusion we may say that there is evidence for the existence of five Visnu temples in Ayodhya in the twelfth century: 1) Harismrti (Guptahari) at the Gopratara ghat, 2) Visnuhari at the Cakratirtha, 3) Candrahari on the west side of the Svargadvara ghats, 4) Dharmahari on the east side of the Svargadvara ghats, 5) a Visnu temple on the Janmabhumi. Three of these temples have been replaced by mosques and one was swept away by the Sarayu. The fate of the fifth is unknown but the site is occupied today by a new Guptahari/Cakrahari temple."
"One of the things that is constantly questioned is profitability. The thinking is mostly: the slave trade is so strange, you only drive it if you earn a lot from it. While, for example, an awful lot of slaves already died of infectious diseases while travelling across the Atlantic. I calculated that the Dutch slave trade was only an estimated 0.005 per cent of national income. So that is not much. Moreover, the Dutch slave trade is the only one that ceased to exist for economic reasons."
"I continue to marvel at this. We got incredibly angry when the city of Palmyra, Syria, was destroyed by IS because the city was reminiscent of pre-Muslim times, shall we say. And I see this as an extension of that. It is nonsense to think that you can erase a past that you don't like."
"A give-and-take situation was created between the two sides so that that slavery could continue to exist."
"You also have to realise that they would not have been free either if they had stayed in Africa. They had already been enslaved."
"The problem is that, in our view, the system (Slavery) is so reprehensible that you really shouldn't talk about it. I think you should."
"There is also emotional literature about the occupation period. That war was not cheerful in the Netherlands, but in my school days, everything was so wonderfully exaggerated, especially the role of the resistance. The facts were pushed aside and if that had continued, we would never have come to any new insights. If we had been blinded by Anne Frank, we would never have discovered that the Netherlands did not play a heroic role at all during that time."
"Incidentally, it was Europeans living in Europe who wanted to abolish the slave trade. They wanted to end it all over the world. So also ín Africa and also in the Middle East. It was just important to come up with arguments to justify such an abolition. One of the arguments devised at the time was that our slave trade threatened to deform entire countries. But that argument, as it now turns out, is historically incorrect. If you look at the quantities and the fact that slavery existed long before the Europeans appeared on the coast there, and that it continued even after the Europeans stopped doing it, I see no scientific arguments at present to attribute primary responsibility to the slave trade for Africa's current economic position in the world."
"That it was precisely productive forces that left is not at all unique. It happens in all migrations. If you look at the period between 1500 and 1900, when that Atlantic slave trade took place, many more people left Europe exactly in the same age range, without us in Europe complaining about losing productive forces."
"Slavery is a common thing. We should not be ashamed of that at all. What we should try to explain is why there was no longer slavery in Western Europe after 1450, but there was still slavery elsewhere in the world. I would venture the proposition that with slavery, Western Europe would have become even richer and grown faster economically than without slavery."
"I think it is important that when water boils at 100 degrees, whether someone is white or black, that someone sees that it boils at 100 degrees."
"My argument in my book is that except for the slave revolt in Haiti, slave revolts did not contribute to slave liberation, but the decision to end it was made in capitals in Europe. Again, I think thinking fundamentally about slavery is really a Western thing. And slave revolts did not contribute to that."
"Both are terrible, the Holocaust and slavery. Very superficially, the comparison can also be made: you were transported and segregated. The difference is that during transport it was advantageous for the Germans to let as many Jews die as possible, racist profit I call it in my book. Not so for the slave traders: they caught a lot of money for living slaves, not for dead ones. They had to stay alive during the crossing."
"Professor, you are creating an atmosphere that is quite inopportune at the moment. The Netherlands is no longer white alone, half of all Amsterdammers are black. For those black people, it is high time that slavery is processed. Otherwise, we will not achieve a harmonious society. Now we are finally allowed to place a monument, a breakthrough has been achieved as far as white awareness is concerned, you come with your watering down. You are a missionary in the service of relativisation."
"What Emmer calls science is the international code that scientific work must adhere to. This is a tradition that was born in the West but has become international. There are very different stories and they are also scientific, but African or Asian. That does not meet Western codes."
"Mr Emmer, you should not trivialise the problem. How about the social consequences? If you want to understand racism, you have to understand where the racist system comes from. If you know the slavery system, then you know that inferiority had to exist there to do that."
"But surely you cannot deny that the person Emmer, a white, male scientist in his 50s, born in the Netherlands, does not also factor in. Of course that matters, especially on a subject like this. Let's agree: there is no such thing as a hard truth here.'"
"History can reach no unchallengeable conclusions on so many-sided a character, on a life so dominated, so profoundly agitated, by the circumstances of the time. For that I bear history no grudge. To expect from history those final conclusions, which may perhaps be obtained in other disciplines, is, in my opinion, to misunderstand its nature."
"[I]t is the historian's task to deal with the individual in relation to the community. Furthermore his task is a very different one from that of the novelist. Though the historian cannot do without imagination, he remains tied to the event, to data, to testimonies, and he lacks the omniscience which enables the poet to plumb his characters to the most secret places of their hearts."
"The historian no less than the artist is a creator. Through his selection and interpretation he creates our awareness of the past; and through that awareness we attain a sharper consciousness of our own nature and that of the society to which we belong. It is his function, not to create useful myth, but to contribute to that knowledge of the world and of ourselves which is the only genuine guide to judgment and thus to action; not to make us clever for next time, as Burckhardt once said, but to make us wise for ever. It is only by the academic disciplines, by detailed scholarship, hard thinking and meticulous intellectual honesty that this can be done. That is the answer given with such noble clarity by Professor Geyl."
"In October 1944, just as the Netherlands was being liberated from the Nazis, the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl completed one of the most original books of the many tens of thousands about Napoleon which have appeared over the past 215 years. Its originality lay not in Geyl's own view of Napoleon (though the book certainly made plain what he thought of him) but in its recounting of the views of others, and in the way it traced the different phases of Napoleon's reputation between 1815 and his own time."
"His volume of essays is the most important survey of general historical problems that has appeared for many years... Geyl is one of the few living men whose writings make us feel that Western civilisation still exists."
"Wisdom is shot through with a rich humanity... he represents the model towards which we ought to aspire."