Andrew Delbanco > Quotes

“So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.”
― Andrew Delbanco

“Fugitives from slavery ripped open the screen behind which America tried to conceal the reality of life for black Americans, most of whom lived in the South, out of sight and out of mind for most people in the North. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation putatively based on the principle of human equality was actually a prison house in which millions of Americans had virtually no rights at all. By awakening northerners to this grim fact, and by enraging southerners who demanded the return of their “absconded” property, fugitive slaves pushed the nation toward confronting the truth about itself. They incited conflict in the streets, the courts, the press, the halls of Congress, and perhaps most important in the minds and hearts of Americans who had been oblivious to their plight. This manifold conflict—under way long before the first shots were fired in the Civil War—was the war before the war.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“As one southern-born antislavery activist later wrote, it was a “sad satire to call [the] States ‘United,’” because in one-half of the country slavery was basic to its way of life while in the other it was fading or already gone. The founding fathers tried to stitch these two nations together with no idea how long the stitching would hold.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Cutting to the heart of the matter, Lincoln made the irrefutable point: “People of any color seldom run, unless there be something to run from.” Two SLAVERY AND THE FOUNDERS 1.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Before dismissing such men as 'mediocre, timid, and weak,' one might ask oneself how many of us would welcome such a war, especially without the knowledge of hindsight?”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“To face this fact is to encounter one of the most demanding challenges in thinking about history: explaining how people in the past could have failed to see what seems so clear to us in retrospect. This is an imperative task but also a delicate and exacting one. On one hand, explanation can shade into excuse, on the other hand, passing judgment on the past can be a form of self-congratulation in the present.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Confronting this question takes us beyond a world where the line between good and evil is sharp and bright, into a gray confusion where navigation was soul-trying work.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“It is the rare young writer who does not fall in love with the idea of becoming famous, and Melville was no exception. When he remarked years later to Hawthorne that no man “who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows,” he was reproving his younger self for having craved it.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“Southerners who had insisted on states’ rights now demanded federal intervention to enforce what they considered their property rights.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Sixty years later, a child's primer titled The Anti-slavery Alphabet made the point in rhyme:

S is the sugar, that the slave
Is toiling hard to make,
To put into your pie and tea
Your candy and your cake”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Moby-Dick was Melville’s vampire book. It sapped him—but not before he had invented a new kind of writing that, we can now see, anticipated the kind of modernist prose that expresses the author’s stream of consciousness without conscious self-censorship. Melville”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“However historically or prophetically one prefers to read him, Ahab is a brilliant personification of the very essence of fanaticism, and therefore too grand a conception to be confined to any one exemplar of it.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“In Redburn, ten years after the fact, Melville reconstructed his own journey as the first time in his life that he was neither pampered nor pressured by adults who placed high hopes in him, but was ordered about as just another hired hand. “Let to rove / At last abroad among mankind,” he found himself amid rough men who had no interest in his pedigree except as a subject for mockery. In Liverpool, he was struck by the sight of black men embracing willing white women, and of people dying or dead in the gutter while pedestrians passed by unfazed as if the bodies were trash awaiting disposal by the street sweepers.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“The Douglass of the memoirs is a paragon. There is little trace in him of the man who sometimes must have been petty, impulsive and vain--not a piece of property to be utilized in one way or another but, as one putative friend complained, a "haughty" and "self-possessed' man with the low as well as exalted desires that constitute freedom. To pretend otherwise is to treat him once again as less than human.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“with merry shouts and laughter.” For the history of literature, the important occurrence on Monument Mountain was the immediate and intense connection established that day between Melville and Hawthorne. The older man (Hawthorne was forty-six) had reviewed Typee four years earlier, and his interest in Melville was now renewed by their meeting, which a local journalist reconstructed some thirty years later: “One day it chanced that when they were out on a pic-nic excursion, the two were compelled by a thunder-shower to take shelter in a narrow recess of the rocks of Monument Mountain. Two hours of enforced intercourse settled the matter. They learned so much of each other’s character, and found that they held so much of thought, feeling and opinion in common, that the most intimate friendship for the future was inevitable.” Within a few days, Hawthorne got hold of every book Melville had written and, as Sophia wrote to Duyckinck, read rapidly through them while lying “on the new hay in the barn.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“And yet vile as it was, the fugitive slave law was also, ironically, a gift to antislavery activists, both black and white, because wherever it was enforced, it allowed them to show off human beings dragged back to the hell whence they came—a more potent aid to the cause than any speech or pamphlet.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“As the American political system went to pieces before his eyes, Melville saw in Calhoun one model for his haunted captain; but more than that, he turned the Pequod into a sort of Democratic Party death convention—a ship of political fools sailing headlong for disaster. To the metaphysics, formal experiments, and maritime realism of Moby-Dick he added a layer of political satire:”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“transcends our own tiny allotment of days and hours if
we are to keep at bay the "dim, back-of-the-mind suspicion that one may be adrift in an absurd world."'
The name for that suspicion-for the absence or diminution of hope-is melancholy. Melancholy is the dark twin of hope. Ever since it acquired a name from the Greek words for black bile, melanos chole, it has been thought to exert a particularly strong hold on certain people, and, as the great anatomist of melancholy Robert Burton put it, to afflict certain "kingdoms, provinces, and Politickal Bodies [that] are subject in like manner to this disease.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope

“For years, northerners had managed to convince themselves that slavery was somebody else’s problem. Yet everyone knew that northern banks invested heavily in cotton, and that in some northern ports the slave trade itself continued as an illegal, but tacitly permitted, smuggling business. In 1846, with war against Mexico looming, Theodore Parker had remarked that “Northern Representatives … are no better than Southern Representatives; scarcely less in favor of slavery, and not half so open.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“The defeat of Mexico at first seemed another step toward the glorious fulfillment of America’s manifest destiny, but it turned out to be one of those instances with which history is replete, in which military victory sets off a political crisis in the land of the victor. “The United States will conquer Mexico,” Emerson declared in 1846, “but it will be as the man who swallows the arsenic which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us.” Privately,”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“Moby-Dick became in the broadest sense a political novel. Melville made of the Pequod a mirror of America rushing westward, poisoning itself by eating up a continent, “a cannibal of a craft … tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies,”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“What Does KLM Mean in WhatsApp?

According to Urban Dictionary, KLM is another way of saying 'Calm', “which means fine or okay" +1-(888) 307-0060 (US) or +44 (20) 39972666 (UK) as the abbreviation for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.”
― Andrew Delbanco

“And then there was Frankenstein. While in London, Melville had acquired from Bentley a copy of Mary Shelley’s novel about an errant genius who hunts down the quasi-human monster he has created after it has turned against him and murdered the woman he loves. Having tracked the creature to the icy North, Frankenstein commandeers a scientific expeditionary ship headed to the Arctic and turns it into an instrument of his private vengeance. This story of obsession and revenge so captured Melville’s imagination that when he read in Lamb’s Final Memorials about William Godwin’s (Mary Shelley’s father) gift for creating characters “marvellously endowed with galvanic life,” he wrote in the margin: “Frankenstein.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“but in Moby-Dick, politics became a central element in the larger constellation of themes, as if the incidental realism of Redburn and White-Jacket had been melded with the political allegory of Mardi. The Pequod becomes a replica of the American ship of state; its thirty-man crew (“isolatoes federated along one keel”) matched in number the thirty states that constituted the Union in 1850. The Pequod’s labor system, made up of white overseers and dark underlings, replicates that of “the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“A year earlier, when the evening air started to have an autumn bite, Melville had begun to turn his whaling adventure into the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“Searching for models in art as well as literature, he had roamed the picture galleries during his trip to London, visiting the Dulwich and Vernon collections, the newly established National Gallery, the royal collections at Hampton Court and Windsor Castle, and the vast private collection of Samuel Rogers. He had seen seascapes by Canaletto and Claude Lorrain, and was particularly drawn to those of J. M. W. Turner, in which he saw intimations of what, in Moby-Dick, he was to call the “howling infinite.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“about—and with—the missionary zeal of the United States: We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.… God has given to us, for a future inheritance, the broad domains of the political pagans, that shall yet come and lie down under the shade of our ark, without bloody hands being lifted. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.… Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And let us always remember, that with ourselves—almost for the first time in the history of earth—national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America but we give alms to the world.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work

“What does KLM mean in WhatsApp?
Kiss Like Mice
KLM" is commonly used as an abbreviation for "Kiss Like Mice" or "Kiss Love Mice," +44 (20) 39000610 which is a playful and informal way to express affection or end a conversation with a lighthearted tone +44 (20) 39000610 (UK) // +1 (888) 800-9117 (US)”
― Andrew Delbanco

“The problem of the 1850s--how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union--was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.”
― Andrew Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

“Africa (1799), or was at least favorably aware of Park’s account of the kindness, refinement, and modesty of African mothers. One consequence of Melville’s years at sea was a certain cosmopolitan amusement at how human beings organize themselves into ranks, and at how those doing the organizing always reserve a place for themselves at the top.”
― Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work