Quotes from Stacy Schiff

The past was at all times within reach, a nearly religious awe aimed in its direction. This was especially true in Egypt, which had a passion for history, and which for two millennia already had kept a written record.

He was the world-renowned tamer of lightning, the man who had disarmed the heavens, who had vanquished superstition with reason.

As his subject Samuel Adams chose: Is it lawful to resist the supreme magistrate if the republic cannot otherwise be preserved?

In John Adams's worst nightmare, the story of the American Revolution assumed a different formulation: "The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod—and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislatures, and war.

If something foreign arrives at Paris, they either think they invented it, or that it has always been there. —Horace Walpole

The First Mistake in Public Business Is the Going into It

There is all the same some truth to the allegation that — as one intimate put it — the American Revolution could be blamed on the Harvard College library.3

History is that thing that, in hindsight, one always saw coming; a few seem able to glimpse it before it has settled on its destination

a man who spoke no English, who would argue that whole conversations could be sustained in that language with the use of a single word (Goddamn)

Proust fared better. "I cannot even begin to tell you how much pleasure we both derive from the mere presence of LA RECHERCHE in our dwelling," Véra thanked her husband's Gallimard editor, but this before she had begun the Maurois-edited volume, into which she was appalled to see that a great number of slips and misprints had crept. She could not help it; hers was the kind of eye to which typos positively leapt.

Aesop's fable: As the Lion said to the Man, "There are many statues of men slaying lions, but if only the lions were sculptors there might be quite a different set of statues.

Only a small, supernatural figure remained at the scene of the crime.* He did resolve one mystery while in Salem: indeed the devil needs conscious human collusion to work evil.

John Jay would offer the best analysis later, to George Washington: "There is as much intrigue in this state house as in the Vatican, but as little secrecy as in a boarding school.

A well-connected son of the establishment, he strained to find his place, loitering his way toward his future.

To have a villainous ruler imposed on you was a misfortune. To elect him yourself was a disgrace.

To one visitor Alexandrian life was "just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined.

Franklin was perfectly philosophical on the subject: "For when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views.

Salem endures not only as a metaphor but as a vaccine and a taunt. It glares at us when fear paralyzes reason, when we overreact or overcorrect, when we hunt down or deliver up the alien or seditious. It endures in its lessons and our language.

Two thousand years of bad press and overheated prose, of film and opera, cannot conceal the fact that Cleopatra was a remarkably capable queen, canny and opportunistic in the extreme, a strategist of the first rank.

He is drunk at least 22 hours of every 24 and never without one or two whores in company.")

He muscled words into deeds

We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are. We

They were inculcated with a firm sense of noblesse oblige, as with a respect for hierarchy; the Slonim girls knew well how to decode a social situation, and what they could rightfully expect from one. In part these seemed to be survival tactics for living in an uncertain time.

The Franklin known to the French, the Franklin who had briefly visited Paris in 1767 and 1769 was—in Voltaire's description—the discoverer of electricity, a man of genius, a first name in science, a successor to Newton and Galileo.