academics-from-portugal

"He (Da Gama) then ordered the upper and lower lips of the Brahman to be cut off, so that all his teeth shewed, and he ordered the ears of a dog on board the ship to be cut off, and he had them fastened and sewn with many stitches on the Brahman instead of his, and he sent him in the Indian boat to return to Calicut."

"The historian Gaspar Correa describes what da Gama did next: When all the Indians had been thus executed [sic], he ordered their feet to be tied together, as they had no hands with which to untie them: and in order that they should not untie them with their teeth, he ordered them to strike upon their teeth with staves, and they knocked them down their throats; and they were put on board, heaped on top of each other, mixed up with the blood which streamed from them; and he ordered mats and dry leaves to be spread over them, and the sails to be set for the shore, and the vessel set on fire … and the small vessel with the friar [Brahmin], with all the hands and ears, was also sent ashore, without being fired."

"“It will be clear from the reading of VIII and IX that council, far from forbidding the use of the vernacular, had rather recom- mended its use for the teaching of Christian doctrine.’’"

"“We do not know what to admire in such a proposal of the Inquisitor, his malice or foolishness. Undoubtedly it is the height of malice to affirm that Goan Councils had prohibited the natives to talk in their mother tongue, and had obliged them to speak the Portuguese language alone. It is foolishness to make people believe that through the vernacular alone could the Botos and other Hindu priests explain the tenets of their belief and sect with a view to convincing the native Christians."

"Filipe Nery Xavier, in his periodical Gabinete Literatorio mentions an instance in which under the orders of the Inquisition an entire family of Bassein were burnt at stake and their home razed to the ground. He writes : “ In this same district (Bassein) we discovered in 1840, a part of a flat stone raised in 1786 on the site of » house which the Inquisition had ordered to be razed to the ground. This carried an inscription which read as follows : ‘“ They, being dogmatists of the said sect, practised rites and ceremonies with the participation of many other persons, and for this were condemned by the Holy Office and being delivered to secular justice burnt in the Auto de Fé celebrated on December 80, 1747, It was ordered that their houses should be demolished and ploughed with salt and this stone erected in detestation of the said crimes.” This action was according to the rule laid down in the code of the Inquisition.’ F. Nery Xavier states that in 1865 this stone was lying on the road broken in two parts."

"One Inquisitor with eighteen years of service in the Inqui- sition of Goa, proposed to His Majesty, in the year 1781, the following : ‘ The first and the principal cause of such a lamentable ruin (loss of souls) is the disregard of the law of His Majesty, D. Sebastido of glorious memory, and the Goan Councils, prohibit- ing the natives to converse in their own vernacular and making obligatory the use of the Portuguese language ; this disregard in observing the law, gave rise to so many and so great evils, to the extent of effecting irreparable harm to souls, as well as to the royal revenues. Since I have been though unworthy, the Inqui- sitor of this State, ruin has set in the villages of Nadora (sic), Revora, Pirna, Assonoré and Aldona in the Province of Bardez ; in the villages of Cuncolim, Assolné, Dicarpalli, Consua, and Aquem in Salsete ; and in the Island of Goa, in Bambolim, Curca, and Siriddo, and presently in the village of Bastora, in Bardez. In these places some members of village communities, as aiso women and children have been arrested and others accused of malpractices ; for since they cannot speak any other language but their own vernacular, they are secretly visited by Botos, servants and High Priests of Pagodas who teach them the tenets of their sect and further persuade them to offer alms to the Pagodas and to supply other necessary requisites for the ornament of the same temples, reminding them of the good fortune their ancestors had enjoyed from such observances and the ruin they were subjected to, for having failed to observe these customs ; under such persu- asion they are moved to offer gifts and sacrifices and perform other diabolical ceremonies, forgetting the law of Jesus Christ which they had professed in the sacrament of Holy Baptism. This would not have happened had they known only the Portuguese language ; since they being ignorant of the native tongue the Botos, Grous and their attendants would not have been able to have any communication with them, for the simple reason that the latter could only converse in the vernacular of the place. Thus an end would have been put to the great loss among native Christians whose faith has not been well grounded, and who easily yield to the teaching of the Hindu priests.’"

"“But we confine ourselves to what concerns the language. The whole system of the Inquisition aimed not only at the extirpa- tion of superstitious and idolatrous beliefs, but also of innocent usages and customs retaining even a trace of the Asiatic society, which existed previous to the conquest by the Portuguese. Consequently the language was involved in this general proscription."

"“The Inquisition cannot be absolved from a large share in the persecution of the vernacular ; and what is more, a larger part in the ruin of the Portuguese Empire in Asia."

"I realized that choosing a building or any kind of built structure immediately gave me a righteousness of place. Architecture rooted the work in the place and had an amazing other quality, which is that, particularly with public buildings, everybody knows them; they belong to everybody in the city."

"I think it’s time to start looking at these buildings as African architecture and no longer putting these tags of Modern architecture from colonial times. Of course, you will never take that history away, but they’ve now belonged to the people that are living in them for much longer than they did during colonial times and so they should be seen as African architecture."

"Ângela Ferreira occupies a special position in the history of artistic approaches to archival practices. One of the pioneers of research-based strategies at the very beginning of the 1990s—before these strategies had a name and long before they became a widespread (sometimes jaded) paradigm—the artist also applied her archival impulse as a new critical tool for sculpture, rooted in expanded and ethnographic procedures. But what marks Ferreira out in the contemporary art world is that her work often concerns the region of sub-Saharan Africa and, more specifically, South African and Mozambican realities inflicted by the troubled history of colonization, post-colonization, and apartheid."

"When you have an emotion you are recruiting a variety of mechanisms that came in the long history of evolution, long before emotions arose, and those mechanisms all had to do with how an organism manages its life."

"Emotions are triggered by what we like to call emotionally competent stimuli, that is, objects or situations that can be real, like in front of you, or be in your mind when you think and you recall, and they act on brain devices that were designed by evolution."

"There are three levels of self to consider: the proto, the core, and the autobiographical. The first two are shared with many, many other species, and they are really coming out largely of the brain stem and whatever there is of cortex in those species."

"And indeed, if VSL is correct, black holes may have very different properties than we thought. Collapsing stars could have a totally different demise and die a rather eccentric death."

"Cornelia would not be altogether surprised if she saw the grazing cow start tap dancing, lap dancing, or whatever quantum gravity might cause cows to do."

"Although the term dialogue was really a euphemism for scientists trying to kill each other, this format worked very well..."

"Ever since then, the place has accommodated people with the necessary level of imbalance required to come up with new ideas."

"Inflation is really like drugging the baby universe with speed. The supercool union of the hitherto unfriendly gods was blessed by amphetamine, and this made the universe inflate rather than just expand. The early orgy of expansion in the universe comes to an abrupt end as soon as the supercooled particle stuff finally freezes."

"For instance, the blood of hibernating arctic squirrels may supercool to minus 3 degrees, when it would normally congeal. The supercooled blood still flows, since it remains a liquid, but the slightest disturbance will cause it to freeze, killing the squirrel; therefore, you should not disturb hibernating arctic squirrels."

"I've always felt that copious use of the word 'something' allows anyone to solve any problem, even insoluble ones."

"Thus, the distance between any two galaxies increases in time, creating the illusion of mechanical motion. But in reality, galaxies just sit there, contemplating the spectacle of the universe creating more and more space in between them."

"In that year [Einstein] had roughly equal numbers of large and small cats. Therefore, quite logically, he cut two holes in each door: a large one for the large cats, and a small one for the small cats. It made perfect sense. ... A hole should have a meaningful existence, and the small cats might be offended if a personalized nothing was not prepared for them."

"It was then that through the open door Einstein saw the man connecting the new battery, and precisely at the same time he did it, Einstein saw the cows jumping up away from the wire. All at once. Exactly. A fair amount of displeased mooing ensued."

"The game of science can accurately be described as a never-ending insult to human intelligence."