Russell Shorto > Quotes

“We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death.”
― Russell Shorto, Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason

“Opinions differ on the question of whether a golden age is something you can experience while it's happening or whether it only comes into focus on reflection...no matter how grand and prosperous and momentous the time in which you are living may be, its grandeur is inevitably stained by the incessant drabness of the present.”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“...the curious Dutch classification gedogen, which means 'technically illegal but officially tolerated.”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much -- constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade -- that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out.”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“Where land was controlled by noblemen and/or the Church in other parts of Europe, in the province of Holland, circa 1500, only 5 percent of the land was owned by nobles, while peasants owned 45 percent of it.”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“For individual freedom can come about only, can be conceived only, if there is some sense of security to life.”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“You could look at the work of any Dutch master for an idea of the morning light we cycle through. There is a white cleanness to it, a rinsed quality. It’s a sober light, without, for example, any of the orange particulate glow you get from the Mediterranean sun.”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.”
― Russell Shorto, Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason

“a basic component of individual rights is the right to own property.”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“Embedded in this outlook is an idea of the body as a machine, so that illness is seen as a breakdown of the machine, healing involves repairing the broken parts, and a doctor is a kind of mechanic with medications as his or her tools.”
― Russell Shorto, Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason

“There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might “go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation”).”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“The Dutch were among the earliest adopters of a new technology—the printed book—and”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might 'go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation').”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“There, she identified a recurring cycle that kept women in a downward spiral: families that were already poor and struggling to stay alive kept having more babies, dragging them down still further. In the 1870s she became the country’s first advocate for contraception, and one of the first anywhere. In the midst of a society and a medical profession that were rigorously Victorian in their attitudes about sex, she had patients conduct trials of contraceptives and concluded that the pessary, a kind of diaphragm, was the most effective birth control device.”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“So how, in an increasingly interconnected world, do we integrate and still keep our values?”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“Instead, power went to those who made things happen: businessmen and local magistrates. Over time, human nature being what it is, these men would create a kind of nobility, sometimes even buying titles from cash-poor foreigners, but this in itself underscores the point. Upward mobility was part of the Dutch character: if you worked hard and were smart, you rose in stature. Today that is a byword of a healthy society; in the seventeenth century it was weird.”
― Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

“Manhattan is where America began.”
― Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World

“It was possible, as far as they knew, that the western shore, which in fifty years’ time would be christened New Jersey, was in fact the backdoor of China, that India, with its steamy profusion of gods and curries, lay just beyond those bluffs.”
― Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World

“As happens so often in history at the dying of one age and the birth of another, an era of phenomenal ugliness, strife, and chaos was about to unfold.”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker - the inventor of analytic geometry, no less - a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.”
― Russell Shorto, Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason

“No,” he answered. If Stanton figured he was teaching the slave a lesson, Venture knew that by staying locked up he was depriving Stanton of his labor. He would stay in chains. “Well then, I will send you to the West Indies or banish you,” Stanton replied, “for I am resolved not to keep you.” Conditions in a Caribbean plantation meant a virtual death sentence. Venture was ready for this. “I crossed the waters to come here,” he shot back, “and I am willing to cross them to return.”
― Russell Shorto, Revolution Song: The Story of America's Founding in Six Remarkable Lives

“This book tells the story of that moment in time. It is a story of high adventure set during the age of exploration—when Francis Drake, Henry Hudson, and Captain John Smith were expanding the boundaries of the world, and Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Galileo, Descartes, Mercator, Vermeer, Harvey, and Bacon were revolutionizing human thought and expression.”
― Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World

“[Charles the Fifth], pretty much every way worked to hold up the pillars of the medieval world order: monarchic power, domination by the Catholic Church, feudal land management, divine right, mercantile colonialization, and obedience to authority along the strict metaphysical line of the great chain of being.”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“the colony, enough time to impress the settlers with his abilities, and then returned to Europe; now he was coming back. Not long after his ship, the Sea-Mew, passed through the narrows between Staten Eylandt”
― Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World

“Relying on physical remedies alone was often seen as downright ungodly: in England, Puritan minister John Sym advised “caution” that people “dote not upon, nor trust, or ascribe too much to physical means; but that we carefully look and pray to God for a blessing by the warrantable use of them.” To do otherwise—to rely on a physic or powder alone—would be to put the material above the spiritual. That was why a strictly mechanical approach to medicine was considered dangerously atheistic.”
― Russell Shorto, Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason

“He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it.”
― Russell Shorto, Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason

“If what made America great was its ingenious openness to different cultures, then the small triangle of land at the southern tip of Manhattan Island is the New World birthplace of that idea, the spot where it first took shape.”
― Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

“You know what I’ve often said, ever since Auschwitz. Life is absurd. It has no meaning. But it has beauty, and wonder, and we have to enjoy that.” Her hand was still on his cheek, her arm”
― Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City

“It might be constructive instead to envision dozens of tribes in the northeastern portion of the future United States, speaking a variety of languages, worshipping a panoply of gods, and holding various beliefs about their people, the creation of the world, the meaning of life. Some”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America

“isn’t the combination of pluralism and capitalism the glue that holds all modern cities together?”
― Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America