Quotes from Stacy Schiff

Adams came of age, too, at a time when the Massachusetts economy was markedly on the skids. Plenty of other young men stumbled in finding their footholds. On leaving Harvard shortly after Adams, a future colleague would try his hand as a schoolmaster. Miserable, he sailed off as a merchant, later as a whaler. He was soon back in Boston. In a patched gown, he served briefly as a chaplain. Out of options, he turned to the law.

History's what people are trying to hide from you, not what they're trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury. — HILARY MANTEL

Dimitri had driven his mother back to Montreux from the Lausanne hospital at dusk on July 2, in his blue Ferrari, on the last day of his father's life. Véra had sat silently for a few minutes and then uttered the one desperate line Dimitri ever heard escape her lips, Let's rent an airplane and crash.

You came into my life and not the way a casual visitor might (you know, 'without removing one's hat') but as one enters a kingdom, where all the rivers have waited for your reflection, all the roads for your footfall.

A good-sized Ptolemaic vessel could carry three hundred tons of wheat down the river. At least two such ships made the trip daily—with wheat, barley, lentils—to feed Alexandria alone.

Were taxes to be levied, Franklin warned, pandemonium would result. Especially when it came to imposing burdens on people, he observed, it was wise to consider what they were inclined to think as well as how they ought to think.

In the only letter he wrote that Christmas, Franklin conceded that he no longer coveted the Brillon house as once he had. His feelings for his neighbor's wife remained constant, however. If in her travels she was to meet the Holy Father, he hoped she might petition him for a repeal of the Ten Commandments. They were miserably inconvenient.

Young women routinely went to law school; half the medical faculty in prerevolutionary times were women, as were a quarter of economics students. Oddly, even when the anti-Semitic decrees had made legal careers inaccessible to Jews, government schools for girls remained open to Jewish girls.

Resentment is a passion, implanted by nature for the preservation of the individual. Injury is the object which excites it. Injustice, wrong, injury excites the feeling of resentment, as naturally and necessarily as frost and ice excite the feeling of cold, as fire excites heat, and as both excite pain. A man may have the faculty of concealing his resentment, or suppressing it, but he must and ought to feel it. Nay he ought to indulge it, to cultivate it. It is a duty. —John Adams

He had come a long way since his conviction, as a twenty-year-old, that honesty could not be counterfeited.

We have believed in any number of things - the tooth fairy, cold fusion, and benefits of smoking, the free lunch - that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are.

Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft

Cicero's take on official Rome was less flattering: "A more raffish assemblage never sat down in a low-grade music hall," he huffed

There was every reason, however, why she would have a natural ear for a narrative technique later described as a "system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.

quickly Franklin folded the owlish John Adams into his debilitating rounds, sweeping him off to meet the la Rochefoucauld family in their baronial home. He did so before Adams yet felt appropriately outfitted for any kind of Parisian outing. That anxiety would underline the difference between the two envoys, one of them self-conscious about his attire, the other confident that fashion would follow him, both of whom were right.

Mandelstam wrote of the Jewish tutor who first introduced him to the concept of Jewish pride and whom he failed to believe, as he could see the tutor put that pride away as soon as he set foot again in the street.

honesty very nearly constituted a religious principle for her.* She believed in full candor, which was not the same as full disclosure.

Octavian died at age seventy-six, at home in his bed, one of the few Roman emperors not murdered by close kin, another Hellenistic legacy. Having ruled for forty-four years—twice as long as Cleopatra—he had plenty of time in which to refashion the events that had brought him to power.

Not long thereafter Lawson committed an indiscretion that left him issuing solemn apologies to the London ministry. He acknowledged having dishonored his profession with his "uneven and unwary conversation." He battled for several years to clear his name.

It is not difficult to understand why Caesar became history, Cleopatra a legend.

Mostly they had no place to go. Berberova's description of the face of the continent at the time goes some way toward explaining their inertia: "On the map of Europe were England, France, Germany, and Russia. In the first, imbeciles reigned, in the second living corpses, in the third villains, and in the fourth villains and bureaucrats.

A few columns stand out as Adams's; he had not yet perfected his prose style, but he had found his voice. He is calm, deliberative, and precise. He is unassailably logical. The sentences are long; the embrace of the semicolon ardent. He did not revert, as did his contemporaries, to the exclamation point, or to long ribbons of capital letters. He trusted muscular reasoning to stand on its own.

The right-minded were those who insisted on colonial liberties. Treason, he held, consisted of the failure to defend those liberties.

At the same time, the centuries felt closer than they do to us today. Alexander the Great was further from Cleopatra than 1776 is to our century, yet Alexander remained always vividly, urgently present.