Nowadays most long novels are bad

Besides, nowadays most long novels are bad. It was different a hundred or two hundred years ago. Today life moves faster, its parts are less connected; one assumes of most interesting events and relations (however intense) that they will be of no greater length or complication than can be described in twenty or thirty pages.

A. Lurie, Real People (1969), Collected edition (1999), 375

The Hungarians are more honourable and cleaner infidels

The Hungarians are Protestants while the Austrians are Catholics. Therefore these two infidel groups are opposites to one another, despite their both being Christians. ... In short, though both are unbelievers without faith, the Hungarians are more honourable and cleaner infidels. They do not wash their faces every morning with their urine as the Austrians do, but wash their faces every morning with water as the Ottomans do.

Evliya Celebi, Book of Travels 7.3, ed. & tr. R.Dankoff & S. Kim, An Ottoman Traveller (2010), 230-31

As for coffee: it is an innovation

As for coffee: it is an innovation; it prevents sleep; it dulls the generative powers; and coffee houses are dens of sedition.

Evliya Celebi, Book of Travels 1.6, ed. & tr. R.Dankoff & S. Kim, An Ottoman Traveller (2010), 25

I have no enemies ... I've had them all shot

'Do you forgive your enemies?' a nineteenth century Duke of Valencia [this one] is asked on his deathbed in a famous Spanish anecdote. 'I have no enemies,' he retorts, 'I've had them all shot.'


J. Morris, Spain (1964. revised 1979), 47

She has a fatal weakness for the past

Party it is plain old-fashionedness that makes Spain feel so special. She has a fatal weakness for the past. When the French were building in the Gothic style, she was still building Romanesque. When they moved to the Renaissance, she was still building Gothic. She retained her medieval values when they had long been abandoned elsewhere in Europe, so at the Spanish universities in the eighteenth century they were still wondering whether Copernicus was right,  and anxiously debating whether sky was made of metal or fluid.

J. Morris, Spain (1964. revised 1979), 26

More often plunging helplessly downwards in a welter of despair and recrimination

Spanish geographers are very fond of elevation graphs - diagrams which, by cutting an imaginary slice through the Iberian Peninsula, show how its altitudes vary from sea to sea. If you apply this approach to the slab of Spanish history, you will find that though the graph is often bumpy, its general outline is all too sadly simple.From the beginning of history to the sixteenth century, the Spaniards gradually climbed towards the pinnacle of their success - hindered often by wars and invasions, but steadily accumulating wealth, culture, prestige, and unity. From the sixteenth century until our times, on the other hand, they have been constantly slithering downhill, sometimes bravely digging their heels in, more often plunging helplessly downwards in a welter of despair and recrimination. Spanish history does not form a happy pattern, but at least it looks symmetrical.

J. Morris, Spain (1964. revised 1979), 12

[Burke]

[The state] becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born. Each contract of the particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society.

Individuals were tenants, not freeholders, of the political communities into which they had been born, by which they had been shaped and into which their descendants would be born in turn. From that insight sprang an ethic of stewardship, closer to today's Greens than to any conventional political party, and utterly at variance with the Trinity of Choice, Freedom and the Individual.

D. Marquand, Mammon's Kingdom (2014), 199

I obviously agree with the author's and commentator's lines here. I find the identification of this approach with the Greens alone preposterous.