Tony Horwitz > Quotes

“The first thing you notice, coming to Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest. The difference is so profound that you're left wondering when the mutation in Semitic blood occurred, as though God parted the Red Sea and said: "Okay, you rude ones, keep wandering toward the Promised Land. The rest of you can stay here and rot in the desert, saying 'welcome, most welcome' and drowning each other in tea until the end of time.”
― Tony Horwitz, Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

“There are people one knows and people one doesn't. One shouldn't cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“I am an agnostic on most matters of faith, but on the subject of maps I have always been a true believer. It is on the map, therefore it is, and I am.”
― Tony Horwitz, One for the Road: An Outback Adventure

“Finally, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November 1863 as Thanksgiving: a day to solemnly acknowledge the sacrifices made for the Union....Shopping was part of the American Dream, too. So in 1939, at the urging of merchants, FDR moved Thanksgiving ahead a week, to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. And there it has remained, a day of national gluttony, retail pageantry, TV football, and remembrance of the Pilgrims, a folk so austere that they regarded Christmas as a corrupt Papist holiday.”
― Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World

“You asked how I'd define prejudice. That's it. Making assumptions about people you've never met.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Egyptians undergo an odd personality change behind the wheel of a car. In every other setting, aggression and impatience are frowned upon. The unofficial Egyptian anthem "Bokra, Insha'allah, Malesh" (Tomorrow, God Willing, Never Mind) isn't just an excuse for laziness. In a society requiring millennial patience, it is also a social code dictating that no one make too much of a fuss about things. But put an Egyptian in the driver's seat and he shows all the calm and consideration of a hooded swordsman delivering Islamic justice.”
― Tony Horwitz, Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

“Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“The past was a consumable, subject to the national preference for familiar products. And history, in America, is a dish best served plain. The first course could include a dollop of Italian in 1492, but not Spanish spice or French sauce or too much Indian corn. Nothing too filling or fancy ahead of the turkey and pumpkin pie, just the way Grandma used to cook it.”
― Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World

“Hardcore chicken!”
― Tony Horwitz

“The scale of Monument Avenue also amplified the weirdness of the whole enterprise. After all, Davis and Lee and Jackson and Stuart weren't national heroes. In the view of many Americans, they were precisely the opposite; leaders of a rebellion against the nation - separatists at best, traitors at worst. None of those honored were native Richmonders. And their mission failed. They didn't call it the Lost Cause for nothing. I couldn't think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“When Union litter-bearers climbed out of their trenches, four days after the assault, they found only two men still alive amongst the piles of stinking corpses. One burial party discovered a dead Yankee with a diary in his pocket, the last entry of which read: “June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“It is difficult to gaze in awe at the wonders of ancient Egypt with modern Egypt tugging so insistently at your sleeve.”
― Tony Horwitz

“I've been here in Richmond for six years and I still don't get it. To me, having the principal Richmond monuments dedicated to the Lost Cause is like saying we're dedicated to no hope, no future. It's like having a monument to unrequited love.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“If there was an overriding message in his journals, it was that people, the world over, were alike in their essential nature—even if they ate their enemies, made love in public, worshipped idols, or, like Aborigines, cared not at all for material goods.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Seven severely depressed prisoners were listed as having died of “nostalgia.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“We were raised Methodists,” Sue said. “But we converted to the Confederacy. There wasn’t time for both.”
“War is hell,” Ed deadpanned. “And it just might send us there.”
― Tony Horwitz

“Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Andersonville lay on American soil and saw the death of 13,000 Americans in American custody.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Cook,” the historian Bernard Smith speculates, “increasingly realised that wherever he went he was spreading the curses much more liberally than the benefits of European civilization.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“I asked him if he thought “there” was better than “here.” “Not better,” he said. “I mean, my great-great-grandpap got his leg shot off. But I feel like it was bigger somehow.” Hawkins flipped through pages of Civil War pictures. “At work, I mix dyes and put them in a machine. I’m thirty-six and I’ve spent almost half my life in Dye House No. 1. I make eight dollars sixty-one cents an hour, which is okay, ’cept everyone says the plant will close and go to China.” He put the book back on the shelf. “I just feel like the South has been given a bum deal ever since that War.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“I later read a survey about Southerners' knowledge of the War; only half of those aged eighteen to twenty-four could name a single battle, and only one in eight knew if they had a Confederate ancestor.
This was a long way from the experience of earlier generations, smothered from birth in the thick gravy of Confederate culture and schooled on textbooks that were little more than Old South propaganda. In this sense, ignorance might prove a blessing. Knowing less about the past, kids seemed less attached to it. Maybe the South would finally exorcise its demons by simply forgetting the history that created them.
But Alabaman's seemed to have also let go of the more recent and hopeful history embodied in Martin Luther King's famous speech. "I have a dream," he said, of an Alabama where "black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Like so much in Atlanta, Stone Mountain had become a bland and inoffensive consumable: the Confederacy as hood ornament. Not for the first time, though more deeply than ever before, I felt a twinge of affinity for the neo-Confederates I'd met in my travels. Better to remember Dixie and debate its philosophy than to have its largest shrine hijacked for Coca-Cola ads and MTV songs.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“Every Slaveholding State,” John junior wrote in May, “is furnishing men and money to fasten Slavery upon this glorious land, by means no matter how foul.” The worst threat came from “Border Ruffians” based in neighboring Missouri who moved in and out of Kansas, harassing anyone who showed free-soil leanings. The Border Ruffians were particularly adept at voter fraud and intimidation. A territorial census in early 1855 found 2,905 eligible voters in Kansas. Yet proslavery forces “won” an early election that March with 5,427 votes.”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“The way I see it," King said, "your great-grandfather fought and died because he believed my great-grandfather should stay a slave. I'm supposed to feel all warm inside about that?”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“These westbound pioneers slogged through the morass on foot, or in wagons drawn by mules and oxen. Impossible for them to conceive that their mud march would one day become sport for modern Americans,”
― Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

“In their attitude to history, some New Zealanders resembled die-hard white Southerners in America, who enshrined Confederate leaders and symbols without acknowledging the offense this might cause to others. Sheila”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before

“Pierce also blamed the nation’s deepening divide on “wild and chimerical schemes of social change” and “a fanatical devotion to the supposed interests of the relatively few Africans in the United States.” Rarely had the U.S. government’s acquiescence to the Slave Power been so plainly expressed—and done so by a dough-faced Yankee from New Hampshire.”
― Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War

“There was another, much clearer survival of freethinking ways. Sisterdale had never had a church, and Joe said his family had rarely spoken of religion except to dismiss it. "Dad would tell us, 'Dat's for Catholics', or 'Dat's for Lutherans, not us,' and said that if he wanted to talk to God he could do it in the fields.”
― Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

“What I felt at that moment wasn’t sorrow for the 9/11 victims, but mortification. Tiny Ecuador gave precious pottery as a token of its heritage. My nation, the hemisphere’s richest, offered only this: Share our fear and feel our pain. In a venue designed to promote global amity and understanding, the United States chose to emphasize how divided and troubled the world remained. It was a minor thing, really, a display in a little-visited Dominican museum. But still, the exhibit rankled: my own small wall of shame.”
― Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World

“The world of the rural poor remained what it had been for generations: a day’s walk in radius, a tight, well-trod loop between home, field, church, and, finally, a crowded family grave plot.”
― Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before