Quotations from Random Sources

Like the science quotations, these are a rather random collection of quotations that I have bothered to write down. They are not “the most important” things I have read. They are merely the things I thought to note at the time of reading.

Contents

Michael Cooper, ed.—João Rodrigues's Account of Sixteenth-Century Japan, London, 2001.

p. 313
…they list their most important liberal arts in two groups, signified by the words gei and no….

The second word, no [juno, ten arts], means the liberal arts, or the skill and ability in them, and this in itself is honourable, esteemed, and practised by grandees, nobles, and gentlemen of both the patrician and military orders. They list ten of these. Some of them pertain to the office of families of the royal household and are therefore noble, while others belong to the household of the kubo, the High Constable and Commander of the Kingdom, and are therefore highly regarded by the nobles and gentry. They are as follows.

  1. The art of shooting with bow and arrow, a military and very noble exercise among them. This is the principal military art in all of Asia and in China, and among the Tartars and Koreans.
  2. The game of ball with the tip of the foot [kemari]. This is a game of the royal palace and played among the kingdom's grandees called kuge. Thence it has spread to the ordinary people and even to the bonzes, their religious.
  3. Carving [meat], a very common and noble office among them.
  4. The art of horse-riding.
  5. The art of good breeding and social customs of the kingdom. There are various books written about this, and there is a noble family in the kubo's household that provides masters of this art and ceremonies.
  6. Arithmetic.
  7. The art of hunting and shooting, practised by all the lords, even the Lord of Tenka.
  8. A certain kind of poetry that many people jointly compose on a theme or verse, each one composing his verse in keeping with the previous verse that it follows. Among the nobles this is a very common art and requires great understanding and judgement.
  9. Playing musical instruments used by the nobles, such as flutes and others.
  10. The game on a board, or chess, of which they have two kinds. There is another of 360 pieces, half of them white and half of them black, with a board of the same number of squares. This is a very common game among the nobles in China and Japan, for it is a certain kind of battle that requires great judgement.

Quoted in Alev Lytle Croutier—Harem: The World Behind the Veil, New York, 1988.

I am a harem woman, an Ottoman slave. I was conceived in an act of contemptuous rape and born in a sumptuous palace. Hot sand is my father; the Bosporus, my mother; wisdom, my destiny; ignorance, my doom. I am richly dressed and poorly regarded; I am a slave-owner and a slave. I am anonymous, I am infamous; one thousand and one tales have been written about me. My home is the place where gods are buried and devils breed, the land of holiness, the backyard of hell.
—Anonymous

The first sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets, on which sat the ladies; and on the second, their slaves behind them, but without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed.
—Lady Montagu, 1717 [emphasis added; you can imagine this must have been a bit of a shock to an eighteenth century English Lady]

Fred Charles Iklé—Every War Must End, 2nd revised edition, New York, 2005.

p. 1
On s'engage et puis on voit.
—Napoléon

p. 61 (about “treason”)
The English language is without a word of equally strong opprobrium to designate acts that can lead to the destruction of one's government and one's country, not by giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but by making enemies; not by fighting too little, but by fighting too much or too long. “Adventurism”—much too weak a word—is perhaps the best term to describe this “treason of the hawks.”

Footnote (p. 140): The French word trahison, from which the English “treason” derives, retains the broader meaning of “treason” plus “betrayal” (as does the German word verat). Hence, in these languages, it is more appropriate than in English to use the same word for the treason of helping the enemy behind the back of one's government and the betrayal of the national interest through the instigation or prolongation of hostilities behind the back of one's own appropriate national authorities.

[What the last sentence overlooks is when the act is perpetrated by the national authority.]

p. 81
In the internal debate about war aims, “hawkish” factions often remain curiously blind to the fact that their own survival after the war as an influential group within the nation is endangered by the stance they assume. In this respect, “hawks” are rather “apolitical,” if being “political” means to have a keen sense for the survival of one's power. … (p. 82) And while the British military got their way in 1917, imposing horrendous casualties on their own country, fifteen years later the popular opposition to rearmament kept England unprepared against Hitler's aggression.

[…and resulted in the blind appeasement pursued by Neville Chamberlain, further delaying any preparation for hostilities.]

p. 95
In conflicts that are predominantly civil wars, however, outcomes intermediate between victory and defeat are difficult to construct. If partition is not a feasible outcome because the belligerents are not geographically separable, one side has to give all, or nearly so, since there cannot be two governments ruling over one country, and since the passions aroused and the political cleavages opened render a sharing of power unworkable.

[It seems that no one in Africa has read this book—power-sharing in Zimbabwe will clearly not work and it is yet to be proven that Kenya will hold together. (Written2008-12-18. Three days later the U.S. withdrew its support for the Zimbabwe agreement, saying it wasn't workable as long as Mugabe remained.)]

[After the American Revolution many British loyalists moved to Canada rather than stay in the new nation.]