Quote from my reading: Adolf Hitler

“The man with the Charlie Chaplin moustache, who had been a down-and-out tramp in Vienna in his youth, an unknown soldier of World War I, a derelict in Munich in the first grim postwar days, the somewhat comical leader of the Beer Hall Putsch, this spellbinder who was not even German but Austrian, and who was only forty-three years old, had just been administered the oath as Chancellor of the German Reich.”

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, p. 4.

Quote from my reading: Future of the Planet Earth

“In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come…will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.

Conclusion to the Foreword of William L Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. xii.

Quote from my reading: Spelling

“This movement towards systematizing language obviously called for spelling rules. And this forced the question, Would French have phonetic or etymological spelling? In some modern languages today, such as Spanish and Arabic, spellings are phonetic. English and French are both notable for having maintained etymological spellings (that is, based on historic forms of the words)…. In some cases spellings conform to sounds; in others they reflect the history of the word…. English speakers like to see the history of the word in its spelling. This is why French spellings, like English spellings, make little sense.”

The Story of French, Nadeau and Barlow, p. 55.

Quote from my reading: Speed and Travel in the American West

“The same passion for speed that had made western travelers risk fire and brimstone to get there first by steamboat—and that induced pony express riders to risk life and limb—also explained the early displacement of the steamboat by the railroad.”

The Americans, Volume 2: The National Experience, p. 102.

Quote from my reading: Settling the American West

“More than almost anything else, they valued the freedom to move, hoping in their movement to discover what they were looking for.”

The Americans, Volume 2: The National Experience. Daniel Boorstin, p. 95.

Quote from my reading: Crime and Punishment

“Crime was rare, for punishment was certain.” (Settling the West)

The Americans, Volume 2: The National Experience. Daniel Boorstin, p. 86.

Quote from my reading: Lawyers

“We needed no laws…until the lawyers came.” (Settling the West)

The Americans. Volume 2: The National Experience. Daniel Boorstin, p. 84.

Quote from my reading: The Universe

“…faith in a universe not measured by our fears….”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 353.

Quote from my reading: The Future of Mankind

“I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to be—that man may have cosmic destinies that he does not understand.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 353.

Quote from my reading: Age

“As I grow older, I grow calm.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 353.

Quote from my reading: Freedom

Freedom means the right to experiment.

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 346.

Quote from my reading: Niagara Falls

Comments recorded by people viewing Niagara Falls: “Roll on.” “Ceaseless thunder.” “Echoing the nothingness of men.” “Emotions of sublimity.” “Boiling waters.” “Didn’t it look grand—and you feel small?” “This is but the breathing of the great Imo! What must his anger be.” “Oh God! Great are thy works! Oh! Man! How small are thine, when placed in the same view.” “Don’t men know what they are going to write before they begin, and say it so; they and some others know, after it is written.”

American Earth, 2008, pp. 50 to 61.

Quote from my reading: Trees

“It needs but a few short minutes to bring one of these trees to the ground; the rudest boor passing along the highway may easily do the deed; but how many years must pass ere its equal stand on the same spot.” Susan F. Cooper. 1850. Rural Hours.

American Earth, 2008, p. 57.

Quote from my reading: Trees

“At length, nearly three long centuries after the Genoese had crossed the ocean, the white man came to plant a home on this spot, and it was then the great change began; the axe and the saw, the forge and the wheel, were busy from dawn to dusk, cows and swine fed in thickets whence the wild beasts had fled, while the ox and the horse drew away in chains the fallen trunks of the forest.” Susan F. Cooper. 1850. Rural Hours.

American Earth, 2008, p. 54.

Quote from my reading: The Churches of Rome

“To go into most of the churches [in Rome] is like reading some better novel than I find most novels.”

Henry James, Watch and Ward, p. 88.

Quote from my reading: Politics

“T.R. was a politician. He had to be, it was the nature of his job. Holmes hated politics, had no pleasure in maneuvering men.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 336.

Quote from my reading: Politics and Marriage

Mrs. Holmes to TR: “Washington…is full of famous men and the women they married when they were young.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 334.

Quote from my reading:Extinction of the Indian and the Buffalo

“Nature has nowhere presented more beautiful and lovely scenes, than those of the vast prairies of the West; and of man and beast, no nobler specimens than those who inhabit them—the Indian and buffalo—joint and original tenants of the soil and fugitives together from the approach of civilized man; they have fled to the great plains of the West, and there under an equal doom, they have taken up their last abode, where the race will expire and their bones will bleach together.”

George Catlin, Letters and Notes…. 1841, p. 40, in American Earth, 2008.

Quote from my reading; Personality Trait

“It was a specialty of Hubert’s that in proportion as other people grew hot, he grew cool.”

Henry James, Watch and Ward, p. 66.

Quote from my reading: Conversation

“On the whole, this interview may have passed for Nora’s first lesson in the art, indispensable to a young lady on the threshold of society, of talking for a half hour without saying anything.”

Henry James, Watch and Ward, p. 64.

Quote from my reading: Capital and Labor

“One of the eternal conflicts out of which life is made up is that between the effort of every man to get the most for his services, and that of society, disguised under the name of capital, to get his services for the least possible return.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 305.

Quote from my reading: Government

Grover Cleveland: “He mocks the people…who proposes that the government shall protect the rich and that they in turn will care for the laboring poor.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 303.

Quote from my reading: Life

From Mark Twain’s Autobiography: “A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and their vanities; those they love are taken from them and the joy of life is turned to aching grief; the burden of pain, care, misery grows heavier year by year; at length ambition is dead; pride is dead; vanity is dead; longing for release in their place; it comes at last—the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them—and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they have existed—a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever; then another myriad takes their place and copies all they did and goes along the same profitless road and vanishes as they vanished—to make room for another and another and a million other myriads to follow the same arid path through the same arid desert and accomplish what the first myriad and all the myriads that came after it accomplished—nothing!”

The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Ed. Charles Neider.

Quotes from my reading: Age

“Looking around him, now in his forties, Holmes noticed the absence of long-familiar faces. His friends had by no means begun to die of old age as yet. But things seemed to happen to them, now that the first vigorous thrusts of youth were gone. People failed, dropped out of sight.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 281.

Quote from my reading: America

“By 1880, there was more than a suspicion that in spite of the hopes of the [Founding] Fathers, political liberty would never result in economic equality.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 279.

Quote from my reading; Personality

“In fact, Hubert had apparently come into the world to play. He played at life altogether; he played at learning, he played at theology, he played at friendship; and it was to be conjectured…he would play with especial relish at love.”

Henry James, Watch and Ward, p. 24.

Quote from my reading: News

“…news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy.”

Thoreau, Walden.

Quote from my reading: American Judicial Issues

“When Holmes came to the Bench, the burning issues of the day were labor’s grievances against the employer, and the people’s grievance against the corporations: two manifestations of the individual’s battle for survival in a collectivist world.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 278.

Quote from my reading: America

“A country that in Holmes’s youth had been rural in tone now rushed to build new cities. Jefferson’s fears had come to pass. Men lived piled upon one another, struggling for survival under smoking factory chimneys of which Jefferson could not have dreamed. By 1883, the transition from a rural to an industrial economy was gathering momentum; in the 1900s the ills attending it would be acute.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 278.

Quote from my reading: The Masses

“…Goethe had said the masses were always childish.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 277.

Quote from my reading; Challenge

“The place for a man who is complete in all his powers is in the fight.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 272.

Quote from my reading: Teaching

“Years ago, Holmes had become convinced that no man could actually teach another anything. All a teacher could do was to let his students be partners in his work—impart as it were a ferment….”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 268.

Quote from my reading: Law

“Holmes approved the case system. Law only ends with a theory; it begins with a concrete case. Naturally, a student remembers an actual instance more vividly than a general principle.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 267.

Quote from my reading: Life

“God strike me, but sometimes I doubt there is any justice, any goodness, I doubt it all. Life, you see, crushes things deep inside us, it shatters our faith.”

Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann, p. 730.

Quote from my reading: Study.

“One deep conviction remained: he knew himself to be only at the beginning. The years of study had completed nothing. They had merely opened a door.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, 266.

Quote from my reading: Reward

“The only reward which I have promised myself is that a few men will say well done.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, 265.

Quote from my reading: Law

“He was looking at the law pragmatically; he was saying that judge-made law is predicated according to its effect, not developed…according to precedent.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 257.

Quote from my reading: Law

“…he was saying that judicial decision does not derive wholly from precedent. He was saying that a good judge unconsciously predicts a law according to the result it will have upon the community at large.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 256.

Quote from my reading: Law

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy avowed or unconscious, even the prejudice which judges share with their fellow men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 256.

Quote from my reading: Jargon.

“He had always disliked what he called ‘the jargon of specialists’; it implied a kind of snobbism.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 255.

Quote from my reading: Time-Travel

Simon Morley wonders about whether he could go back from 1970 to live in the New York City of 1882:“Was it possible for me to go back and live out my life with Julia? Could I do that knowing the future? Could I live in nineteenth-century New York and look at infants in their carriages, knowing what lay ahead for them? It was a vanished world; actually nearly every soul in it long since dead: could I ever really join it?”

Time and Again. Jack Finney, p. 393.

Quote from my reading: America

Simon Morley meditates on whether he should let Julia stay in the twentieth century where she has come from the year 1882: “No, I won’t let you stay here. Julia, we’re a people who pollute the air we breathe. And our rivers. We’re destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we’ve begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison in our children’s bones, and we knew it. We’ve made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended Polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to persuade our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate ach other. And we’re used to it.” (1970)

Time and Again. Jack Finney, p. 378.

Quote from my reading: Legislation

OW Holmes: “The fact is…that legislation…is empirical. It is necessarily made a means by which a body, having the power, puts burdens which are disagreeable to them on the shoulders of someone else.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 246.

Quote from my reading: Self-love.

Dr. Holmes: “Self-love…is a cup without any bottom.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 243.

Quote from my reading: Originality

“In plain words he must face the loneliness of original work. No one can cut new paths in company. He does that alone.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 231.

Quote from my reading: Ideas.

Fanny Dixwell to Uncle John Holmes: “Has your nephew[Oliver Wendell Holmes], all his life, professed to care more for ideas than he cares for people?”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 225.

Quote from my reading: The Novel and Empathy

“This respect for others, empathy, lies at the heart of the novel.”

Azar Nafisi. Quoted in Theresa A. Kushaga. College English (May 2008), p. 507.

Quote from My Reading: Ideas.

“Holmes was struck anew with the awful power of ideas to change the world.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 217.

Quote from My Reading: Government.

“Wendell Holmes was never to believe wholeheartedly in the power of legislation to change men’s lives.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 211.

Quote from My Reading: Pioneers.

“What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 199.

Quote from My Reading: Education.

“But when you had mastered the subjects they [the teachers] presented, where did it lead?”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 197.

Quote from My Reading: Night Thoughts

“I was overwhelmed in melancholy; human life was so short it seemed meaningless. It’s the kind of thought you have, usually, only in the deep middle of the night waking up alone in the world.”

Jack Finney, Time and Again (Novel), p. 290.

Quote from My Reading: Impulse.

“I assume most people are tempted—at least the impulse stirs—to occasionally commit the outlandishly impossible: to whistle in church, to say something wildly inappropriate to a situation. It popped up in my mind to yell ‘Boo!’ ”

Jack Finney, Time and Again (Novel), p. 290.

Quote from My Reading: Love.

“It was hard for me to believe it was love, but who ever knows about that, or even what the word means to anyone else.”

Jack Finney, Time and Again (Novel), p. 278.

Quote from My Reading: Time and Again (Novel)

“I was finally going to know what the note in the blue envelope meant. ‘…the destruction by fire of the entire World….' The words were senseless, they didn’t mean anything, only they did: On a day far in the future Andrew Carmody would put a bullet through his head because of them.”

Jack Finney, Time and Again (Novel), 256.

Quote: War and Personality

“Or, perhaps like life itself, war merely makes cynics of cynics—and saints of saints.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 181.

Quote from My Reading: War.

“…Holmes recalled the first time he had tried to use his saber. Down at Edwards Ferry, he had been sent on horseback to carry dispatches. On the road he met a Rebel captain. They tried to get their sabers out. Both got thoroughly tangled up, wheeled, drew their pistols, rode close and pressed the muzzle to the other’s side. Neither pistol went off. No one but a soldier would understand that story.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 180.

Quote from My Reading: Lincoln.

“ ‘Get down, you fool!’ a young voice shouted. Automatically the President [Lincoln] stepped back. It was Wendell Holmes, angry and terrified…. ‘Captain,” he [Lincoln] said, ‘I am glad you know how to talk to a civilian.’ ”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 178.

Quote from My Reading: Personality Types.

“The surgeon…had told him men were divided into two kinds—external men and internal men. Internal men considered ideas more interesting than things…. The opposite, those robust creatures who acted and did not need to think…filled with health and a kind of blessed immediacy, a capacity for living in the present and the present only.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 164.

Quote from My Reading: War.

Wendell Holmes: “War?....War is organized bore.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 163.

Quote from My Reading: America

“It is not our military might or our higher standard of living that has most distinguished us from our adversaries. It is our belief that the state is the servant of the citizen and not its master.”

Eds. Bill Adler and Tom Folsom, The Uncommon Wisdom of JFK, p. 173. .

Quote from My Reading: America.

James Michener, Foreword: “[This is] a story that imparts exactly what makes America unique among nations, where any man or woman may start life with few advantages and then—through courage, brilliance, endurance, and hard work—achieve not only great material wealth but also turn that life into the greatest treasure of them all: a life filled with purpose.”

Piszek & Morgan, Some Good in the World: A Life of Purpose… p. x.

Quote from My Reading: Aggression.

“Generally, other conditions being equal, mere acquaintanceship with a fellow member of the species exerts a remarkably strong inhibitory effect on aggressive behavior.” [Simple acquaintance with the other person reduces aggression.]

Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression. p. 150.

Quote from My Reading: War.

“…but Wendell could not forget. Dead men sprawled among the corn, naked, stripped of trousers and boots, eyes staring, limbs flung out in awful abandon. For these boots and trousers the Rebels had fought like tigers. If the North fought for ‘victory,’ for ‘Union,’ ‘freedom,’ the South fought for shoes to put on its bleeding feet, pants for its legs, and fought no less bravely…. They [the Rebels] were not cowards.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 163.

Quote from My Reading: War.

“The longer he was in the war, the more Wendell Holmes was convinced that not death was the horror, but the loss of a young man’s chance to live. Never to have your chance, never to show the world—to show yourself what you could do!”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 152.

Quote from My Reading: War.

"War was not chivalry. War was not gallantry, heroism, adventure. War was terrible and dull, and a man had better not try to make sense of it. A man had better just keep at it day by day, doing the next job that lay before him."

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 150.