Although this book deals mainly with certain aspects of the remoter American past, it was conceived in response to the political and intellectual conditions of the 1950’s.
It is possible; but in so far as the weight of one’s will is thrown onto the scales of history, one lives in the belief that it is not to be so.
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life
The day after Lula’s lawyer called to tell her she was legal, three Albanian guys showed up in a brand-new black Lexus SUV.
Rehearsing exactly what she would say, Lula, who couldn’t drive, drove across the George Washington Bridge in the brilliant winter sunshine.
Francine Prose, My New American Life
The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast.
They took a long time to burn, each separate sheet charring and curling as the ink faded so that, at last, his own verses shone up at him, silver on black, obstinately refusing to die, and he could not even grasp the poker to beat them into dust.
P. D. James, Unnatural Causes
To understand how economies work and how we can manage them and prosper, we must pay attention to the thought patterns that animate people’s ideas and feelings, their animal spirits.
Most of all, this book tells us that the solutions to our economic problems can only be reached if we pay due respect in our thinking and in our policies to the animal spirits.
George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, Animal Spirits
This is the story of three people.
And then a few nights ago I dreamt I told my mother that I was writing this book and she said, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ and there was the same easy benevolence in her voice that I remember so vividly from the last month she and I spent together.
Julia Blackburn, The Three of Us
On December 16, 1773, at a crowded meeting in the largest church in Boston, the leather-dresser Adam Collson supposedly shouted “Boston Harbor a tea-pot this night!”
The Boston Tea Party remains a poignant moment in history, and it continues to inspire people all over the globe.
Benjamin Carp, The Defiance of the Patriots
The publication of a treatise devoted to argumentation and this subject’s connection with the ancient tradition of Greek rhetoric and dialectic constitutes a break with a concept of reason and reasoning due to Descartes which has set its mark on Western philosophy for the last three centuries.
At its starting point, in making this contribution, is an analysis of those forms of reasoning which though they are indispensable in practice, have from the time of Descartes been neglected by logicians and theoreticians of knowledge.
Chaïm Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric
Archimedes of Syracuse was the quintessential math nerd.
My own modest breakthrough came on that fateful day in Santa Barbara, when I saw the connection between an abstract calculus equation and the motion of Saturn’s rings, and realized, à la Archimedes, “Eurika! This is that!”
Jennifer Ouellette, The Calculus Diaries
On the twenty-fourth of May 1844, Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, seated amidst a hushed gathering of distinguished national leaders in the chambers of the United States Supreme Court in Washington, tapped out a message on a device of cogs and coiled wires:
Like the people of 1848, we look with both awe and uncertainty at what God hath wrought in the United States of America.
Daniel Howe, What Hath God Wrought
My current incarnation is deteriorating; I do not think it will last much longer.
Life was real.
Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island
The mingled smells of oiled mahogany paneling, polished brass, and good tobacco were familiar ones to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
To interpret the Constitution by one’s own best lights is to be an American.
Noah Feldman, Scorpions
“College and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should,” the former president of Harvard University, Derek Bok, recently lamented.
We should choose paths of purpose such as these, as Kennedy reminded us when he exhorted us to reach for the moon, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift
In the late eighteenth century a number of prominent European political thinkers attacked imperialism, not only defending non-European people against the injustices of European imperial rule, as some earlier modern thinkers had done, but also challenging the idea that Europeans had any right to subjugate, colonize, and ‘civilize’ the rest of the world.
Indeed, if a central reason to study the history of political thought is to gain the perspective of another set of assumptions and arguments that are shaped by different historical sensibilities and directed toward distinct political phenomena, and thus to defamiliarize our otherwise complacent political and ethical beliefs and priorities, then the study of Enlightenment anti-imperialism offers productive opportunities for such a task.
Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire
The first case of polio that summer came early in June, right after Memorial Day, in a poor Italian neighborhood crosstown from where we lived.
Running with the javelin aloft, stretching his throwing arm back behind his body, bringing the throwing arm through to release the javelin high over his shoulder—and releasing it then like an explosion—he seemed to us invincible.
Philip Roth, Nemesis
“I promise you four papers,” the young patent examiner wrote his friend.
And thus it was that an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mid reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.
Walter Isaacson, Einstein
The twenty-first century is full of people who are full of themselves.
The two of them can be left there, suspended in the midst of their lives with the Essays not yet fully written, while we go and get on with ours—with the Essays not yet fully read.
Sarah Bakewell, How to Live
Friday evening I was invited to a party at a colleague from work’s house.
It was two in the afternoon.
Michel Houellebecq, Whatever
On August 6, 1965, the President’s Room of the Capitol could scarcely hold the multitude of white and Negro leaders crowding it.
This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here
Everybody understands the obvious meaning of the world struggle in which we are engaged.
The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
Xavier watched two Legionnaires stroll out from the terminal to wait for the flight: dude soldiers in round white kepis straight on their heads, red epaulets on their shoulders, a wide blue sash around their waist, looking like they from some old-time regiment except for the short pants and assault rifles.
“We must be close to it.”
Elmore Leonard, Djibouti
On a soft October evening in 1919 a young theology student walked slowly along a narrow alley in a recently built part of Tehran, not far from the city gate that opened on the road to the town of Qazvin.
Egypt, at least, has not turned her back on a friend.
Gholam Reza Afkhami, The Life and Times of the Shah
Father died last year.
I’ll be forgotten quickly.
Michel Houellebecq, Platform
On a cool Saturday afternoon in January 1954, I set out to drive from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama.
The eternal appeal takes the form of a warning: “All who take the sword will perish by the sword.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Towards Freedom
Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, has been explaining how the complicated happening below the Salt Woman Shrine illustrated his Navajo belief in universal connections.
Just think of the new set of legends this is going to produce.
Tony Hillerman, Skeleton Man
Frank Keating reached for the telephone on a desk the size of a Cadillac sedan.
This event, like nearly all the rest in Cheney’s White House years, was closed to the public and the press.
Barton Gellman, Angler
My first client of the day (and of the week, truth be known) came into my office on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and sat in one of my client chairs.
Otto!
Robert Parker, Painted Ladies
Picture her there in the pinched little galley where you could barely stand up without cracking your head, her right hand raw and stinging still from the scald of the coffee she’d dutifully—and foolishly—tried to make so they could have something to keep them going, a good sport, always a good sport, though she’d woken up vomiting in her berth not half an hour ago.
Night on Santa Cruz Island, night immemorial.
T. C. Boyle, When the Killing’s Done
Mid-way through the afternoon on 14 December 1999, I realised that my New Year was probably going to be a disaster — as usual.
I wasn’t there when the final verdict was returned.
Michel Houellebecq, Lanzarote
In the summer of 2004, Hurricane Charley roared out of the Gulf of Mexico and swept across Florida to the Atlantic Ocean.
It is also a more promising basis for a just society.
Michael Sandel, Justice
It is the beginning of the year of our Lord 1963.
Nonviolence, the answer to the Negroes’ need, may become the answer to the most desperate need of all humanity.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait
The first of July 1998 fell on a Wednesday, so although it was a little unusual, Djerzinski organized his farewell party for Tuesday Evening.
We now believe that Michel Djerzinski went into the sea.
Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles
On the fifteenth of March, two hours before sunrise, an emergency medical technician named Jimmy Campo found a sweaty stranger huddled in the back of his ambulance.
She hasn’t seen Skink since their motorcycle ride on the night Abbott was shot, although she occasionally speaks with Jim Tile, who reports that the former governor is in a good place.
Carl Hiaasen, Star Island
The Republic begins on a day when a group of young men escape from the city for a holiday.
But it is a sign of how vital political theory is today that it captures and illumines the ongoing struggles that give politics its stunning importance.
Jeffery Abramson, Minerva’s Owl
Cleef sat in the hotel bar, alone and at peace.
“Au revior!”
Elisabeth Holding, The Obstinate Murderer
Shortly after the death of the failed Quaker, Steadfast Haynes, the Central Intelligence Agency received a telephoned blackmail threat that was so carefully veiled and politely murmured it could have been misinterpreted as the work of some harmless crank.
“Well,” he said, “that’s a long and rather curious story.”
Ross Thomas, Twilight at Mac’s Place
The big kitchen of the Murrys’ house was bright and warm, curtains drawn against the dark outside, against the rain driving past the house from the northeast.
“In this fateful hour, it was herself she placed between us and the powers of darkness.”
Madeleine L’Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet
During the 1970s and 1980s a word disappeared from the American vocabulary.
Until we decide to end the long reign of American apartheid, we cannot hope to move forward as a people and a nation.
Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid
Are living things designed?
And resolving Cleanthes’ dilemma means making evolution a biological phenomenon once more: not a pale atomistic imitation of life, as a NeoDarwinist Philo would have it, and not the inscrutable thought of an intelligent designer that a modern Demea would favor, but a living phenomenon replete with the purposefulness and intentionality that is the fundamental attribute of life itself.
J. Scott Turner, The Tinkerer’s Accomplice
The clerk will call the roll for final passage…
On a more personal note, Rostenkowski’s daughter, Stacy, received a successful kidney transplant at the end of 1985, which has helped her return to good health.
Jeffrey Birnbaum and Alan Murray, Showdown at Gucci Gulch
If I rolled my chair back into the window bay behind my desk, I could look up past the office buildings and see the sky.
His face was without expression.
Robert Parker, Rough Weather
I work as a science journalist.
Then, as now, that kind of work offers all of us a beacon of hope.
Cornelia Dean, Am I Making Myself Clear?
If there was one article of faith that John Meriwether discovered at Salomon Brothers, it was to ride your losses until they turned into gains.
In December, fifteen months after he lost $4.5 billion in an epic bust that seemed about to take down all of Wall Street and more with him, Meriwether raised $250 million, much of it from former investors in the ill-fated Long-Term Capital, and he was off and running again.
Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed
Three events, reflected the 78-year-old historian Henry Adams in 1906, had thrown into an “ash-heap” the “old universe” into which he had been born.
If they do not, then it may be time to remember not only the limitations but also the possibilities of antimonoply as a civic ideal.
Richard John, Network Nation
Epistemology is an old subject; until about 1920, it was also a great one.
If the “pure” scientist is to deserve the generous support presently being lavished on him, we must be able to show that his problems are genuinely significant ones and that his problem of research is sufficiently progressive to be worth gambling our precious and limited resources on it.
Larry Laudan, Progress and its Problems
The word paradise is Persian in origin.
If America can rediscover the path that has been the secret to its success since its founding and avoid the temptations of empire building, it could remain the world’s hyperpower in the decades to come—not a hyperpower of coercion and military force, but a hyperpower of opportunity, dynamism, and moral force.
Amy Chua, Day of Empire
I sat by the phone and willed it to ring.
Until it does, it will serve as a fitting reminder of how a few dozen people in DPG saw the “blood in the water” and made $1 billion in two short years.
Frank Partnoy, F.I.A.S.C.O.
John is a quant trader running a midsized hedge fund.
With the framework provided in this book, the job of understanding what quant traders do, discerning which ones are more likely to succeed, and ascertaining how to use them in a portfolio is hopefully a bit easier.
Rashi Narang, Inside the Black Box
Philosophy, Bertrand Russell finds in his History of Western Philosophy, has been, and still is, something intermediate between theology and science.
That legacy contains the reasoned and humanitarian faith that the future course of evolution has room in it for the coöperative efforts of free individuals to enrich life with peaceful and creative activities beyond the sheer struggle for existence and power.
Philip Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism
Anybody who has visited a garbage dump in the developing world knows that value is an ambiguous concept.
Indeed, even Greenspan learned just how badly prices can fail and send our decisions and our lives astray.
Eduardo Porter, The Price of Everything
Inchmale hailed a cab for her, the kind that had always been black, when she’d first known this city.
She wakes beside Garreth’s slow breathing, in their darkened room, the sheets against her skin.
William Gibson, Zero History
Why should economists care about philosophy?
This is not the best of all possible worlds, but it is very easy to make it worse.
Alexander Rosenberg, Economics—Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns?
The two-passenger car that raced through Malibu shortly after 5 A.M. on New Year’s Day at speeds exceeding 82 miles per hour was an almost new Mercedes-Benz 500SL with an out-the-door price of $101,414.28.
“Not just yet,” Booth Stallings said.
Ross Thomas, Voodoo Ltd.
In the early dawn of May 30, 1832, in the southern Paris suburb of Gentilly, two young men faced each other with pistols drawn.
And when it does, it will be accompanied, as it always has, by a new compendium of stories.
Amir Alexander, Duel at Dawn
No visitor to a foreign country has failed to experience the fascination and unease that accompanies an encounter with unknown traditions and customs.
Find rk in terms of r.
Fukagawa Hidetoshi and Tony Rothman, Sacred Mathematics
Warren G. Harding’s story is an American myth gone wrong.
Harding, in this way, has remained one of the most relevant, if not respected, of presidents.
Phillip Payne, Dead Last
All Burke’s biographers, from James Prior in 1826 to Stanley Ayling in 1988, state that Edmund Burke was born in Dublin, and that his father, an attorney, Richard Burke, was a Protestant and his mother, born Mary Nagle, a Catholic.
Those last four words should be borne in mind as we contemplate some of the patterns emerging in the disintegrating empire of ruined Communism, in the aftermath of the longest-lasting and most formidable innovative effort in human history.
Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody
It was a cold bleak autumn following the spectacular Dragon murder case that Philo Vance was confronted with what was probably the subtlest and most diabolical criminal problem of his career.
He had an air of great importance, and informed me he was rushing to his office to give a woman patient a diathermic treatment.
S. S. Van Dine, The Casino Murder Case
What do you think of when you hear the word “model”?
We conclude with the admonition that the only rule in the Reality Game is to avoid falling into that most common of all human delusions, the delusion of one reality—our own!
James Casti, Alternate Realites
They came to learn his secrets.
His corporation has disappeared; his plans for a dynasty ultimately failed; but, as the directors of his railroads observed, “The work will go on, though the master workman is gone.”
T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon
This page last modified on 2012 January 10.