All Quotes

"If the West’s roots lay in Griechentum, he wrote, “‘... [our western culture] has also been influenced and made fruitful by the Orient, in many and lasting ways, and that ought not to be forgotten or left unsaid. It was, precisely, German scholars whose hard work established these facts and contributed the foundations for a truly historical, and comprehensive, understanding of European cultural development.’"

"Even the threads that bind pre-Hellenic and archaic art to that of the people of the Levant have been much more energetically and lucidly studied than the many-sided inter-mixture of ancient oriental and Greek art in the age of the Diadochi; [and the] outcome (of this inter- mixture] has been seen in a much too one-sided way, as decline and fall. It was believed one could ignore [this art]; actually, however, the contact between the old and immobile and the young, fluid and adaptable [cultures] ought to be understood as the beginning of a new period of art and culture, one which is much more closely connected with the coming middle ages than with the era of the Persian Wars."

"War was simply a slaughterhouse on wheels, he thought. For most men, soldiering was tragedy expressed as a profession."

"Well, the Germans, too, are surrounded by a “great wall.” This wall is not built of masonry, but is spiritual. Anything outside the wall is regarded with contempt. But when such a superior person goes abroad, and finds how much he has been misinformed, he is apt, unless he is a person of very stable temperament, to rush to the opposite extreme, and thence to look down upon all that he has previously venerated. That is why so many Germans who go abroad are lost to Germany. But one who, having gone abroad, remains a good German and wants to enlighten his fellow-countrymen is not understood at home and is despitefully used."

"...the anachronistic conception that Greece and Rome alone should be considered sources of culture for us, and that therefore they must remain for all time the focal point of historical-philological research. [Classicists] still practice that orthodox philology, which claims and possesses an influence, which it has not for a long time deserved, [and] that intolerant onesidedness which only accords the oriental sciences a hearing in so far as they are related to the history and culture of Greece, but otherwise are blind and want to be blind to the enormous field of Asian knowledge, which has brought us into contact with the modern world. [They are still beholden to] that real “unworldliness” in the scholarly sense, which takes no part in the widened historical conceptions of our day. Those are the forces with which Orientalistik has always had to struggle, and which today too block Sinology’s path, ... And added to this is another fact, that one ought to think, should offer [Sinology] a leg up, but actually because of the weirdness of our academic [canons of] scientificness hinders it; and that is its vital connection with the present. If Sinology only had to do exclusively with a long finished, ruined and then re-excavated culture, then perhaps there would be a possibility of finding grace in the eyes of the philological right-thinkers. .."

"What will this Europe be for the Orient in the future? A band of swindlers and oppressors, without honor, without shame!"

"Koeppen’s Buddha was a revolutionary; indeed, the author argues: “‘There is really no question that if the Indian people had not already been completely stripped of their religion and robbed of all courage and zeal for life by theological-priestly vampirism and earthly despotism, the call of liberation and the preaching of the equality of all men which Cakjamuni [Buddha] unleashed would necessarily have led to a rebellion of the lowest classes just as Luther’s preaching of Christian freedom [led to] the peasant revolts.”"

"...the days of intellectual charlatanry in Europe seem to be numbered."

"Human religiosity can go far astray, when it is [articulated in the form of] a church."

"That classical philology received comparative linguistics with mistrust and doubt was very natural. The newborn younger sister threatened to pull the painstakingly prepared ground from under the feet of the elder, in giving her to understand, you have wandered in darkness up until now; I will enlighten you. Few trusted these voices at the beginning, many closed their ears to the sirens’ songs...’"

"For what is more important and can be desired more urgently from the study of classical languages than the comparison of these with our mother tongue in its most ancient, most perfect form?”"

"They would not have it, they would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India. The classical scholars scouted the idea, and I still remember the time, when 1 was a student at Leipzig and begun to study Sanskrit, with what contempt any remarks on Sanskrit or comparative grammar were treated by my teachers. . . . No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin and Gothic. All hands were against him. (28) Unlike some of his contemporaries, Muller was effusive in his admiration for things Indian (although he never subscribed to an Indian homeland). In his course of lectures "India: What Can It Teach Us?" (1883), he declared that she was "the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow," indeed, "a very paradise on earth," a place where "the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, [and] has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life. [Such lavish praise was far too extreme for those who, as Muller himself noted, would be] "horror struck at the idea that the humanity they meet with [in India] . . . should be able to teach us any lesson."

"Though Bopp, by the end of his life, was an internationally respected and honored scholar, his was not a career without conflict. Reflecting much later on the difficulties his teacher faced, Max Muller recalled the period in the 1820s and 1830s in which scholars and especially classicists would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India.... No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, and Gothic. All hands were against him; and if in comparing Greek and Latin with Sanskrit, Gothic, Celtic, Slavonic, or Persian, he happened to have placed one single accent wrong, the shouts of those who knew nothing but Greek and Latin, and probably looked in their Greek Dictionaries to be quite sure of their accents, would never end."

"“I feel grateful, blessed that this happened to me. Now that I have kids, I appreciate work more, I appreciate acting more. Because I feel that I have worked harder this time than before, na parang pinagdaanan ko uli yung pagiging from the bottom (it's like I'm going through being from the bottom again).”"

"Maiisip ko pa lang si Jakob na ganun yung treatment niya na ayaw niya sa'kin (I can only imagine Jakob treating me like that, he doesn't like me), that’s so heartbreaking."

"“They have a lot of fans, but they have their own plans for themselves. As for me, I’m just going to support them.”"

"Practice makes perfect"

"I have served the people well. I gave my all and I am proud to say that my integrity remains intact and I have never wanted to lose sight of the people I have sworn to serve with full fidelity and courage."

"When you're pregnant, you finally start reading ingredients on food. You start caring about yourself by accident, because, you know, you care about the baby. When I got pregnant, I realized how bad I was to myself, how poorly I treated myself. Once I got pregnant, I was like, “Well, I guess I should put a seatbelt on.” You know, “Where is it? Oh.” Like I'm literally putting a seatbelt on for the—it’s so wild that you start having self-respect and caring about yourself only when you're growing another person inside you."

"Once the Cosby thing happened, I was kind of like, anything I hold dear to me truth-wise could be untrue. I'm literally like, yeah, the moon landing, there's something fishy about that. Like yeah, for sure. I don't know if we landed on the moon, but it is funny to me that the moon landing is really what divides us as a country. You know? I don’t know. But my take on the moon thing is actually that—this is a hot take—I just don’t care. Is that weird? Like, it makes no difference to me if they went or not"

"On China and COVID-19: So our enemy made a virus on purpose that killed tons of people, broke our economy, broke our brains, let's be honest, then culminated in all of us posting on social media to stop Asian hate."

"The right is taking books out of schools. Who cares, dude? That’s a states’ rights thing. That is between the parents and the school. Why do you care what books a kid in another state is reading?"

"On Charlie Kirk: He was as close to not a hypocrite as I've seen in a while. Did he lie about stuff? I don’t know. Was he trying out new personalities and personas for social—I truly don’t know. Did he spread lies? I don't know. And by the way, neither do you, because nobody can prove what a lie is."

"What flows, flows. What crashes, crashes. What’s meant to be, will be!"

"To her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours."

"Jerusalem is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions and she is the only city to exist twice—in heaven and on earth: the peerless grace of the terrestrial is as nothing to the glories of the celestial. The very fact that Jerusalem is both terrestrial and celestial means that the city can exist anywhere. New Jerusalems have been founded all over the world and everyone has their own vision of Jerusalem."

"Jerusalem has a way of disappointing and tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to the city’s asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion. But Jerusalem Syndrome is political too: Jerusalem defies sense, practical politics and strategy, existing in the realm of ravenous passions and invincible emotions, impermeable to reason."

"The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims.This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth—the relationship of one people and their God."

"The European upper classes...could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, every one of them a King David and a Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed hobbits with almost supernatural powers."

"For 1,000 years, Jerusalem was exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years, Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic; and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer."

"‘What’s Edith Wharton like?’ ‘Just like our own barons and princelings here. Our secret world is just like hers but with one crucial difference—it’s Edith Wharton with the death penalty.’"

"He hated Genrikh because true possession is to share the fabric of someone else’s life, he decided; it’s about proximity; love as geography."

"‘The greatest privilege of childhood’, she said, ‘is to live safely in the present.’"

"Heartbreak, he thought, is an agonizing disease that you’re delighted to have."

"Sex fills just a few hours of our entire existence, he realized, and yet those precious minutes count more than months and years of our normal lives."

"‘Every love story’s a requiem,’ she told her."

"What’s important is not who you love but who loves you."

"Nikolasha and Rosa had died for the romantic delusion: totalitarian love as reckless melodrama and desperate possession, an orchestra of trumpets and thunderbolts. Now he saw clearly that the real poetry of love was a meandering river, an accumulation of accidents, the momentum of details."

"Six of the last twelve tsars were murdered—two by throttling, one by dagger, one by dynamite, two by bullet. In the final catastrophe in 1918, eighteen Romanovs were killed. Rarely was a chalice so rich and so poisonous."

"An effective tsar could be harsh provided he was consistently harsh. Rulers are often killed not for brutality but for inconsistency. And tsars had to inspire trust and respect among their courtiers but sacred reverence among the peasantry, 90 per cent of their subjects, who saw them as "Little Fathers." They were expected to be severe to their officials but benign to their peasant "children": "the tsar is good," peasants said, "the nobles are wicked.""

"Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality. It flows hydraulically to and from the source, but its currents constantly change; its entire flow can be redirected, even reversed. In an autocracy, the power is always in flux, as changeable as the moods, relationships and circumstances—personal and political—of one man and his sprawling, teeming domains. All courts work in similar ways. In the twenty-first century, the new autocracies in Russia and China have much in common with that of the tsars, run by tiny, opaque cliques, amassing vast wealth, while linked together through hierarchical client–patron relationships, all at the mercy of the whims of the ruler. In this book, my aim is to follow the invisible, mysterious alchemy of power to answer the essential question of politics, laconically expressed by that maestro of powerplay, Lenin: kto kogo?—who controls whom?"

"History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present."

"Looking back over the four centuries covered in this book, it is curious that each of Russia’s Times of Troubles—1610–13, 1917–18 and 1991–99—ended with a new version of the old autocracy, eased by the habits and traditions of its fallen predecessor, and justified by the urgent need to restore order, radically modernize and regain Russia’s place as a great power."

"Neither walls, theatres, porches, nor senseless equipage, make States; but men who are able to rely upon themselves."

"By Themistocles alone, or with very few others, does this saying appear to be approved, which, though Alcaeus formerly had produced, many afterwards claimed: "Not stones, nor wood, nor the art of artisans, make a State; but where men are who know how to take care of themselves, there are cities and walls.""

"I thought if I could talk to editors, if I could talk to s, if I could show them the kinds of things you could do if you were making use of the page rather than just using words, then people would understand there has to be a way of approaching a book more like a film. With film, yes, you start out with a , but the director is given resources with which to realize that film. And everybody understands you can’t know from the beginning what that film is going to be in the end. You are not expected to submit an already completed film in order to get funding. But that is the way publishing works. It’s constrained by a specific restricted idea of what text is, which is this: text is word. You hand in your text, and then it’s handed over to the designer, but you have no contact with that person. The is theirs, the s are theirs; they just do whatever they want, and you have no discussion with them about how the presentation actually relates to what the text is about."

"... was taught at the age of three. ... he had an extremely challenging early education. What would happen if you had a single mother who tried out the ? ... What if the mother would use ' to provide s for her fatherless boy?"

"The literary world does quite like the notion of genius, but it has no place for a Picasso."

"DeWitt has an insatiable mind and deep pockets of knowledge in disparate subjects; she went on tangents about strategies, the quirks of and her obsession with the , who inspired one of her many unfinished novels. She speaks French and German, can read Greek and Latin, and understands close to a dozen other languages with varying degrees of proficiency — among them Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew and Japanese."

"As it turns out, the is not remotely about Tom Cruise fighting alongside 19th-century Samurai in Japan. Rather, it follows the story of a woman named Sibylla raising her brilliant young son Ludo in in 1990s London. Unable to afford heat for their home, the two spend their days riding the . While the story is nominally centered around Ludo’s efforts to find his father, it is really about the pain and pleasure of integrating a unique mind into a world that values different things. Sibylla and Ludo both have excruciatingly high standards, the genius needed to attain them, and a near-total inability to tolerate compromise. Because most people’s lives are a series of compromises made bearable by self-delusion, Sibylla and Ludo are isolated, cut off from the outside world and outside relationships. The particular joy of the book, I think, is that the characters are so intensely and specifically themselves that it is impossible to imagine them working in a more conventional novel. But I believed in them completely — a testament to the strength of DeWitt’s writing."