Quotes from Susan Wise Bauer

In fact, far from being phonetic, hieroglyphs were designed to be indecipherable unless you possessed the key to their meaning. The Egyptian priests, who were guardians of this information, patrolled the borders of their knowledge in order to keep this tool in their own hands. Ever since, the mastery of writing and reading has been an act of power

One of the first Italians to give a name to the reawakened interest in Greek and Roman learning was the poet Petrarch, who announced early in the 1340s that poets and scholars were ready to lead the cities of Italy back to the glory days of Rome. Classical learning had declined, Petrarch insisted, into darkness and obscurity. Now was the time for that learning to be rediscovered: a rebirth, a Renaissance.

To be female and on the throne during the collapse of a Medieval Kingdom generally elicited accusations of lust, corruption, and general visciousness., The queen's sex life becomes a convenient explanation for the end of an era.

Technology can do a great deal to make information gathering easier, but it can do little to simplify the gathering of wisdom.

No one likes to be condescended to, so it's hardly surprising that so many high school students develop a loathing for the modernist novels they're forced to read in senior English and go to the movies instead. (Movies have plots, after all.) They're being good postmodernists.

When you read, you develop wisdom—or, in Mortimer Adler's words, "become enlightened." "To be informed," Adler writes in How to Read a Book, "is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about.

As you read, you should follow this three-part process: jot down specific phrases, sentences, and paragraphs as you come across them; when you've finished your reading, go back and write a brief summary about what you've learned; and then write your own reactions, questions, and thoughts.

Anthropologists can speculate about human behavior; archaeologists, about patterns of settlement; philosophers and theologians, about the motivations of "humanity" as an undifferentiated mass. But the historian's task is different: to look for particular human lives that give flesh and spirit to abstract assertions about human behavior.

Like Peter the Great, Catherine liked many of the ideas of the West... She bought many western customs to Russia. She rewrote Russia's confusing, ancient laws so that her people would have more rights... She opened new schools and started the first college for Russian women. She even made a woman the director of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

God made this country for us," he wrote to Governor Grey. "If it were a whale, we might slice it in half. But it cannot be sliced. We will have to fight for the land that lies between us." Governor

A college boy from Massachusetts named Eli Whitney came south... Eli liked machines, and he liked solving problems.

Now, weavers who worked at home couldn't get anyone to buy their cloth unless they sold it for less. Since they made less money from each piece, they had to work longer. Weavers worked for sixteen hours a day, their fingers sore and their eyes red -- and still couldn't make enough money to buy food.