Michael Meyer > Quotes

“Franklin had been born on January 17, 1706. In inimitable Philadelphia fashion, the city launched its celebration on April 17, the anniversary of his death.”
― Michael Meyer, Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet: The Favorite Founder's Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife, and Blueprint for American Prosperity

“He hated cocktail parties--"you see the same people again and again and it becomes boring"--and found the Westerners who hung around the Peking club "rather ridiculous. Very small frogs in a very small pond acting like they were big frogs in an ocean.”
― Michael Meyer, The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed

“Maybe Beijing kept tearing itself down to bury its unexamined past. Memories didn’t stick to the sleek sides of skyscrapers. Make the sofas thick, the music loud, the televisions large, the cars fast. Blur and round and smooth the past until it becomes as rumored as this disappearing hútòng. Older people will say it was there, they saw it. Their younger listeners will nod politely, unable to imagine something they’d never seen.”
― Michael Meyer, The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up

“phenomenon of seeing several houseflies revived to life, although not by electricity. The insects had been “drowned in Madeira wine,” Franklin wrote, “apparently as soon as they were bottled in Virginia to send here [to London]. When one of those bottles was opened at a friend’s house, three drowned flies fell into the first glass we filled. They started with a few convulsive movements, . . . wiped their eyes with their front legs, flapped and brushed their wings with their hind legs, and flew away, being in ancient England without knowing how they got there.” Franklin wished that humans could be embalmed this way, “so that we could recall them to life when we would like.” As he had “an extreme desire to see the state of America one hundred years from now,” Franklin”
― Michael Meyer, Benjamin Franklin's Last Bet: The Favorite Founder's Divisive Death, Enduring Afterlife, and Blueprint for American Prosperity