Martin Puchner > Quotes

“After having been made a wife to an older man and an attendant to a princess, the identity she chose to retain was the one she had acquired by her own initiative: that of an author.”
― Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

“Like ancient scribes, we are once again scrolling down texts and sitting hunched over tablets. How to make sense of this combination of old and new?”
― Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

“Alexander the Great is well-known as a larger-than-life king. It turns out that he was also a larger-than-life reader.”
― Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

“This is the genius of Don Quixote, a helpless fool who is mad as hell at the world, capturing our collective experience of modern mechanical civilization.”
― Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

“In a way, everyone was a Don Quixote, their heads alive with plots and characters, even if they didn’t act on them directly.”
― Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

“The theory that languages are tools used for particular purposes, sometimes for many different purposes, means that extinct languages belong neither in a museum of art nor in a museum of natural history. Tools are meant to be surpassed by better tools. Once they are, they should be preserved in a museum of technology, of human ingenuity, of the cultural past.”
― Martin Puchner, The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate

“What will endure, I hope, is the idea of Rotwelsch, the idea that marginalized groups develop special languages as tools for survival. We often think of such groups in terms of ethnic identity, but the identity of Rotwelsch speakers was defined by being outside the order of settled society, period. From this position as complete outsiders, they forged an identity by borrowing from the languages around them, with astonishing resilience and inventiveness. Having been cast out from society, they created an idiom that expressed their hard-earned wisdom, their willingness to live differently, and their sheer will to survive.”
― Martin Puchner, The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate

“Bad logic was an early warning sign for prejudice.”
― Martin Puchner, The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate

“In evaluating culture, we tend to overemphasize originality: when and where something was first invented. Claims of origin are often used to prop up dubious claims of superiority and ownership. Such claims conveniently forget that everything comes from somewhere, is dug up, borrowed, moved, purchased, stolen, recorded, copied, and often misunderstood. What matters much more than where something originally comes from is what we do with it. Culture is a huge recycling project, and we are simply the intermediaries that preserve its vestiges for yet another use. Nobody owns culture; we merely pass it down to the next generation”
― Martin Puchner, Culture: The surprising connections and influences between civilisations.