Quotes About Impact

Jim, did your father really blow his brains out because of your mother?" "Yeah. He was on the telephone. He told her he had a gun. He said, 'If you don't come back to me I'm going to kill myself. Will you come back to me?' And my mother said, 'No.' There was a shot and that was that." "What did your mother do?" "She hung up.

Style is important. Many people scream the truth but without style it is helpless.

This is very creative," said Mrs. Fretag, and she began to read my essay. The words sounded good to me. Everybody was listening. My words filled the room, from blackboard to blackboard, they hit the ceiling and bounced off, they covered Mrs. Fretag's shoes and piled up on the floor.

Stanley was right. I never hit another home run. I struck out most of the time. But they always remembered that home run and while they still hated me, it was a better kind of hatred, like they weren't quite sure why. Football

I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen but as the years wasted on nothing ever did, unless I caused it.

I never hit another home run. I struck out most of the time. But they always remembered that home run and while they still hated me, it was a better kind of hatred, like they weren't quite sure why.

anyhow, then I went on to city college where the only molesting I could see going on was what they did to your mind.

To think, somebody had suicided for that.

She has hurt fewer people than anybody I know, and if you look at it like that, well, she has created a better world, she has won.

ela machucou menos gente do que qualquer pessoa que conheço, e se você olhar por esse ângulo, bem, ela criou um mundo melhor. ela venceu.

Se empieza a salvar el mundo salvando a un hombre por vez; todo lo demás es romanticismo grandioso o política

but it was not a history-maker" like smallpox. Treponema pallidum, awful as it was and is, did not help topple empires or push whole peoples to extinction.

After Cortés, the population of the entire region collapsed. By 1620–25, it was 730,000, "approximately 3 percent of its size at the time that he first landed." Cook and Borah calculated that the area did not recover its fifteenth-century population until the late 1960s.

In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding of the new scholarship is not that many people died, but that many people *lived.*

From Bartolomé de Las Casas on, Europeans have known that their arrival brought about a catastrophe for Native Americans. "We, Christians, have destroyed so many kingdoms," reflected Pedro Cieza de León, the traveler in postconquest Peru. "For wherever the Spaniards have passed, conquering and discovering, it is as though a fire had gone, destroying everything in its path.

Colón's signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W. Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea.

To Dobyns, the moral of this story was clear. The Inka, he wrote in his 1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism

The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated.

Dobyns calculated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died. To estimate native numbers before Columbus, one thus had to multiply census figures from those times by a factor of twenty or more.

Farmers have injected so much synthetic fertilizer into their fields that soil and groundwater nitrogen levels have risen worldwide. Today, almost half of all the crops consumed by humankind depend on nitrogen derived from synthetic fertilizer. Another way of putting this is to say that Haber and Bosch enabled our species to extract an additional 3 billion people's worth of food from the same land.

De Soto died of fever with his expedition in ruins. Along the way, though, he managed to rape, torture, enslave, and kill countless Indians. But the worst thing he did, some researchers say, was entirely without malice—he brought pigs.

The natural world is incomplete without the human touch.

The Columbian Exchange had such far-reaching effects that some biologists now say that Colón's voyages marked the beginning of a new biological era: the Homogenocene. The term refers to homogenizing: mixing unlike substances to create a uniform blend. With the Columbian Exchange, places that were once ecologically distinct have become more alike.

Although the archaeological record is suggestive, it is also frustratingly incomplete; soon after the Spaniards visited, mass graves became more common in the Southeast, but there is yet no solid proof that a single Indian in them died of a pig-transmitted disease. Asserting that De Soto's visit caused the subsequent collapse of the Caddo and Coosa may be only the old logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.