Quotes from Stacy Schiff

There are people whose defects become them, and others who are ill served by their good qualities. —La Rochefoucauld

We cannot control events, Samuel Adams liked to say. The trick, he revealed that summer, "is to foresee as far as we are able, prepare for, and improve them.

At the same time, was it not absurd to bleat about liberty when the province bought and sold Africans, "taken from all that is dear to them in their native soil"?

John Willard

the mob and the militia — officially every man between the ages of sixteen and sixty — were one and the same.

Differences of opinion should not be construed as differences of principle.

Among all the freewheeling accusations in 1692, not once had a father accused a son or a son implicated a father.

It was "the duty of every subject, for conscience's sake, to submit to his authority, while he acts according to the law." Should he imperil the natural right and liberties of his subjects, however, "he overthrows the very design of government, and the people are discharged from all obedience.

The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks played no role.)

the border between the human and divine was fluid for Cleopatra.

The people owed it to themselves to monitor those who governed.

At a time of shuddering devastation, they stepped in as the dragon-slayers.

In this world," he reminded a French friend, "it is not faith that saves us, but defiance.

Hutton and Franklin spent all of January 3 together, in the course of which Franklin evidently informed his old friend, "You have only left us the option of perishing by you or with you: we have chosen the latter alternative.

Indeed Cleopatra murdered her siblings, but Herod murdered his children.

diadem, Cleopatra took part throughout the trip in religious

From Canada to Pensacola, families shuddered at the Act

We most often understand the value of time only when we are in a position of having to regret its loss

Few places favor meditation more than the desert

John Willard's widow, who had cowered under the stairs after his beatings, married a Towne in 1694.

The irony that they had come to the New World to escape an interfering civil authority was lost on the colonists, who unleashed on one another the kind of abuse they had deplored in royal officials.

They had contracted a kind of autoimmune disorder, deploying against themselves the very furies they so feared.

Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly.

Mary Walcott's April wedding ceremony