Quotes from Russell Shorto

You know what I've often said, ever since Auschwitz. Life is absurd. It has no meaning. But it has beauty, and wonder, and we have to enjoy that.

While prostitution is legal and regulated (only EU citizens can prostitute themselves, since, as with any other job, a work permit is required)

Upward mobility was part of the Dutch character: if you worked hard and were smart, you rose in stature. Today that is a byword of a healthy society; in the seventeenth century it was weird.

If what made America great was its ingenious openness to different cultures, then the small triangle of land at the southern tip of Manhattan Island is the New World birthplace of that idea, the spot where it first took shape.

Many people--whether they live in the heartland or on Fifth Avenue--like to think of New York City as so wild and extreme in its cultural fusion that it's an anomaly in the United States, almost a foreign entity. This book offers an alternative view: that beneath the level of myth and politics and high ideals, down where real people live and interact, Manhattan is where America began.

The first Manhattanites didn't arrive with lofty ideals. They came--whether as farmer, tanner, prostitute, wheelwright, barmaid, brewer, or trader--because there was a hope for a better life. There was a distinct messiness to the place they created. But it was very real, and in a way, very modern.

a colorful collection of losers and scalawags, inconsequential and meandering, waiting around for the winds of fate to blow them off the map.

The only thing that we can say is really real, truly true, is pure experience. What is real is the flow, the constant but ever-changing pageant comprised of minds and things.

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was a product of Amsterdam's vigorous Jewish community. To this day, Amsterdammers' proud slang term for their city is Mokum, the centuries-old Jewish name for it. (For that matter, Amsterdam slang for "see you later" is the Yiddishism de mazzel.)

uncomfortably modern sound. With only a little nudging

We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death.

Opinions differ on the question of whether a golden age is something you can experience while it's happening or whether it only comes into focus on reflection...no matter how grand and prosperous and momentous the time in which you are living may be, its grandeur is inevitably stained by the incessant drabness of the present.

the curious Dutch classification gedogen, which means 'technically illegal but officially tolerated.

For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much -- constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade -- that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out.

Where land was controlled by noblemen and/or the Church in other parts of Europe, in the province of Holland, circa 1500, only 5 percent of the land was owned by nobles, while peasants owned 45 percent of it.

For individual freedom can come about only, can be conceived only, if there is some sense of security to life.

You could look at the work of any Dutch master for an idea of the morning light we cycle through. There is a white cleanness to it, a rinsed quality. It's a sober light, without, for example, any of the orange particulate glow you get from the Mediterranean sun.

a basic component of individual rights is the right to own property.

There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might "go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation").

Embedded in this outlook is an idea of the body as a machine, so that illness is seen as a breakdown of the machine, healing involves repairing the broken parts, and a doctor is a kind of mechanic with medications as his or her tools.

They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.

So how, in an increasingly interconnected world, do we integrate and still keep our values?

Manhattan is where America began.

There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might 'go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation').