frumiousb

One alarming note was that some of the participants imagine that Putin is being misled, that he hasn't been given the true picture. The Tsar is a good Tsar, but the boyars are bad men. An old, old Russian story.
pg. 139

The feasible alternative would have been to leave the Huguenots alone or at most satisfy the cry against them by civil decrees rather than by force and atrocity. Although ministers, clergy and people thoroughly approved of the persecution, none of the reasons for it was exigent. The peculiarity of the whole affair was its needlessness, and this underlines two characteristics of folly: it often does not spring from a great design, and its consequences are frequently a surprise. The folly lies in persisting thereafter. With acute if unwitting significance, a French historian wrote of the Revocation that “Great designs are rare in politics; the King proceeded empirically and sometimes impulsively.” His point is reinforced from an unexpected source in a perceptive comment by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who cautioned, “In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.” This is a factor usually overlooked by political scientists who, in discussing the nature of power, always treat it, even when negatively, with immense respect. They fail to see it as sometimes a matter of ordinary men walking into water over their heads, acting unwisely or foolishly or perversely as people in ordinary circumstances frequently do. The trappings and impact of power deceive us, endowing the possessors with a quality larger than life. Shorn of his tremendous curled peruke, high heels and ermine, the Sun King was a man subject to misjudgement, error and impulse-- like you and me.
pg. 23

At dawn some sparrows, who had evidently not heard that this was not a pleasure resort and that Popov, the prison governor, had categorically forbidden all contact between birds and prisoners, perched boldly on the edge of the wooden screen, their tails fluttering comically. With joyful voices they ushered in the grandest month of the year. It was the morning of August 1, 1937.
pg. 169

The piled-up dead of political violence are a generic staple of our information diet these days, and according to the generic report all massacres are created equal: the dead are innocent, the killers monsterous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent. Except for the names and landscape, it reads like the same story from anywhere in the world: a tribe in poer slaughters a disempowered tribe, another cycle in those ancient hatreds, the more things change the more they stay the same. As in accounts of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, we are told that experts knew the fault line was there, the pressure was building, and we are urged to be excited-- by fear, distress, compassion, outrage, even simple morbid fascination-- and perhaps to send a handout for the survivors. The generic massacre story speaks of “endemic”or “epidemic”violence and of places where people kill “each other”, and the ubiquity of the blight seems to cancel out any appeal to think about the single instance. These stories flash up from the void and, just as abruptly, return there. The anonymous dead and their anonymous killers become their own context. The horror becomes absurd.
Pgs. 186-187

Complicating Brown's legacy even further is the terrorism of recent times. The historian David W. Blight asks, “Can John Brown remain an authentic American hero in an age of Timothy McVeigh, Usama Bin Laden, and the bombers of abortion clinics?”
pg. 500

Historians and economists who presumably understand money castigate presidents who do not. They should not be astonished by the presidents' failure; the problem lies in the language. The mechanism of the economy can be learned-- if this goes up, that goes down-- but it all becomes something other than a machine when ethical words like “value” and “trustworthy” or emotionally weighted terms like “soft” and “hard” are introduced. A man like Ulysses Grant, who knew what it was to have a business fail, to lack money to pay bills, to be out of work, could not evaluate machines built for him by contending economists and others who claimed to know. The “more money” machine seemed to work when it was demonstrated, but the “less money” machine looked just as good when its mechanic turned it on. The problem, which Grant could never fully articulate but which is evident in his grapplings with the subject in his state papers, is that he could not connect metaphor to reality.
pg. 395-396

The distance between government and its people and the them-and-us mentality it breeds, is central to any understanding of Italy. Everyone feels so badly treated, everything is so legalistic, that people feel justified in being a little lawless.
pg. 17

rhythmaning

Any such dictionary certainly should not be an absolutionist, autocratic product, such as the French had in mind: The English, who had raised eccentricity and poor organization to a high art, and placed the scatterprain on a pedestal, loathed such Middle European things as rules, conventions, and dictatorships. They abhorred the idea of diktats-- about the language, for Heaven's sake!-- emanating from some secretive body of unaccountable immortals. Yes, nodded a number of members of the Philological Society, as they gathered up their astrakhan-collared coats and white silk scarves and top hats that night and strolled out into the yellowish November fog: Dean Trench's notion of calling for volunteers was a good one, a worthy and really rather noble idea.
pg. 107

Had all the world been a school and Wilson its principal, he would have been the greatest statesman in history. But the world's government and peoples were not children obliged to obey him. The world was a little group of willful men who would not and could not be made to behave as Wilson told them they ought to. He was a seer whose achievements never equaled his aims. In the few years left to him he was to become the symbol of the world's hope and of its failure. He was one of those few who formulate the goals for mankind, but he was in the impossible position of trying to function as seer and executive at the same time. He held political office and would not acknowledge that politics is the art of the possible. He obeyed the injunction that a man's reach should exceed his grasp; it was his tragedy that he reached too high.
pg. 121

chickenfeet2003

For me, in the last resort, Alexander's true genius was as a field-commander: perhaps, taken all in all, the most incomparable general the world has ever seen. His gift for speed, improvisation, variety of strategy; his cool-headedness in a crisis, his ability to extract himself from the most impossible situations; his mastery of terrain, his psychological ability to penetrate the enemy's intentions-- all these qualities place him at the very head of the Great Captains of history. The myth of the Great Captains is wearing rather than these days, and admiration for their achievements has waned: this is where we too become the victims of our own age and our own morality. Viewed in political rather than military terms, Alexander's career strikes a grimly familiar note. We have no right to soften it on that account.

Philip's son was bred as a king and a warrior. His business, his all-absorbing obsession through a short but crowded life, was war an conquest. It is idle to palliate this central truth, to pretend that he dreamed, in some mysterious fashion, of wading through rivers of blood and violence to achieve the Brotherhood of Man by raping an entire continent. He spent his life, with legendary success, in the pursuit of personal glory, Achillean kleos; and until very recent times this was regarded as a wholly laudable aim. The empire he built collapsed the moment he was gone; he came as a conqueror and the work he wrought was destruction. Yet his legend still lives; the proof of his immortality is the belief he inspired in others. That is why he remained greater than the measurable sum of his works; that is why, in the last resort, he will continue an insoluble enigma, to this and all future generations. His greatness defies a final judgment.
Pgs. 487-488

Imagination is not madness. Even if in the arbitrariness of hallucination, alienation finds the first access to its vain liberty, madness begins only beyond this point, when the mind binds itself to this arbitrariness and becomes a prisoner of this apparent liberty.
pg. 93

I cannot pinpoint a moment when I became politicized, when I knew that I would spend my life in the liberation struggle. To be an African in South Africa means that one is politicized from the moment of one's birth, whether one acknowledges it or not. An African child is born in an Africans Only hospital, taken home in an Africans Only bus, lives in an Africans Only area, and attends Africans Only schools, if he attends schools at all.

When he grows up, he can hold Africans Only jobs, rent a house in Africans Only townships, ride Africans Only trains, and be stopped at any time of the day or night and be ordered to produce a pass, failing which he will be arrested and thrown in jail. His life is circumscribed by racist laws and regulations that cripple his growth, dim his potential, and stunt his life. This was the reality, and one could deal with it in a myriad of ways.

I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, From henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.
pg. 95