“I remember sitting in this cabin in Alaska one evening reading over the notes of all these encounters, and recalling Joseph Campbell, who wrote in the conclusion to 'Primitive Mythology' that men do not discover their gods, they create them. So do they also, I thought, looking at the notes before me, create their animals.””
“By the same token, the failure to control Hitler after he was released from prison looks unreasonable only with the certainty of hindsight. Through the mid-1920s, he was banned from speaking in most German states, but as time passed and memories of the putsch receded, the bans began to be lifted. After all, Hitler was now pledging to abide by the rules of legality, and how, in a democracy, could a politician be denied the right to be heard, no matter how insidious his message, if he stayed within the bounds of the law? Who”
“Aurore sketched”
“I know that being a man is not just about violence. It is not just about being able to fight. There are plenty of men who have never thought, have never gone to war, and they're still men. Like my brother, for instance. And then there are men who have fought, who were like me. James Barry fought. Which of them should I be more like? Do I even have a choice?””
“Entrepreneurs continually demonstrate that faith and imagination are the most important capital goods in a changing economy, and that wealth is a product less of money than of the mind to create, produce, invest, and, in the often-repeated expression of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, to creatively destroy (to shut down businesses that are not working).””
Joseph Barry is an American real estate developer and co-founder of the Applied Housing Companies and founder of the Hudson Reporter newspaper chain.
“Origen rejected anthropomorphism, not because the scriptures or unanimous Christian tradition specifically rejected it, but because the philosophers "despised" it: "The Jews indeed, but also some of our people, supposed that God should be understood as a man, that is, adorned with human members and human appearance. But the philosophers despise these stories as fabulous and formed in the likeness of poetic fictions.””
“It was the stuff of Alexandre Dumas' novels as it would be of George Sand's; Romanticism had roots in reality.””
“Would not the characters of her many novels be the search, if not the expression, of her many selves? Add the thousands of letters sent, as if cast upon the sea in so many bottles, in the search for understanding, for love... (...)””
“In May 1830, when in Paris alone with little Maurice, she found herself going to museums”
“reminds me of the soldier-thug Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who collaborated with Belgian intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington in 1961 to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically chosen prime minister. Four years later Mobutu, with American support, staged a military coup in Congo, a country he would rename Zaire and rule as a dictator for thirty years, enforcing policies as indifferent to human suffering and misery as Saddam Hussein’s, and, as Mobutu Sese Seko, amassing a personal fortune of some four billion dollars.””
“Among the tens of thousands of prisoners taken by Vespasian in Galilee was the rebel-appointed Jewish governor of the province, Joseph ben Matthias. He was destined to be brought to Rome and executed, but he found a way out. He prophesied to Vespasian that he would be emperor. When in turn the legions indeed proclaimed Vespasian emperor, Joseph was freed from his chains. Although some Romans considered Joseph a Jewish spy, Vespasian and Titus found him useful. After the war, he ended up in Rome living in the palace under their protection, became a Roman citizen named Flavius Josephus, and wrote a detailed history of the revolt that survives today.””