Felipe Fernández-Armesto > Quotes

“There has never been nationhood without falsehood.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto

“Capitalism seems to have failed and is now stigmatized as greed. A reaction against individual excess is driving the world back to collective values. Fear of terror overrides rights; fear of slumps subverts free markets. Consumption levels and urbanization are simply unsustainable at recent rates in the face of environmental change. The throwaway society is headed for the trash heap. People who sense that “modernity” is ending proclaim a “postmodern age.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“to become a great saint, it is no bad first step to be a big sinner.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“Only three routes of upward mobility were available to socially ambitious upstarts such as Columbus: war, the Church, and the sea. Columbus probably contemplated all three: he wanted a clerical career for one of his brothers, and fancied himself as “a captain of cavaliers and conquests.” But seafaring was a natural choice, especially for a boy from a maritime community as single-minded as that of Genoa. Opportunities for employment and profit abounded.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“Unless US citizens acknowledge and understand their country's imperial past, they will not be able to understand its present or future. Much of the recent and current Hispanic resettlement of parts of the United States is a consequence of empire.... Countercolonization follows colonization, and the waves of migrants always flow back like returning tides.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

“To understand what was in Ivan’s mind, one has to think back to what the world was like before Machiavelli. The modern calculus of profit and loss probably meant nothing to Ivan. He never thought about realpolitik. His concerns were with tradition and posterity, history and fame, apocalypse and eternity.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“in their supposed innocence of and opposition to empire, have become the mythic progenitors of the United States—almost as improbably as Solomon was of Ethiopia or Aeneas of Rome or his suppositious brother, Brut, of Britain. But almost everything most Americans think about the Plymouth colonists of 1620 is false. The truth is more credible. The first colonists in Massachusetts, exchanging accusations of “bestial, yea, diabolical affectations,” were as divided and conflicted as people usually are when fate flings them together. Their leaders did not seek”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

“Disdain for blacks as inherently inferior to other people and the pretense that reason and humanity are proportional to the pink pigment in Western flesh were new prejudices. Disgust with Mali fed them. Attitudes remained equivocal, but the balance of white assumptions tilted against blacks. If white respect for black societies had survived the encounter with Mali, how different might the subsequent history of the world have been?”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth Collided

“Like poor immigrants throughout the ages, Jews there adjusted to the jobs no one else would do.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“Cannibalism is a problem. In many cases the practice is rooted in ritual and superstition rather than gastronomy, but not always. A French Dominican in the seventeenth century observed that the Caribs had most decided notions of the relative merits of their enemies. As one would expect, the French were delicious, by far the best. This is no surprise, even allowing for nationalism. The English came next, I’m glad to say. The Dutch were dull and stodgy and the Spaniards so stringy, they were hardly a meal at all, even boiled. All this sounds sadly like gluttony. —PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables

“it aligns the cannibals with their real modern counterparts: those who eat “health” diets for self-improvement or worldly success or moral superiority or enhanced beauty or personal purity. Strangely, cannibals turn out to have a lot in common with vegans.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables

“All definitions of civilization along to a conjugation which goes: "I am civilized, you belong to a culture, he is a barbarian.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto

“An age of expansion really did begin, but the phenomenon was of an expanding world, not, as some historians say, of European expansion. The world did not simply wait passively for European outreach to transform it as if touched by a magic wand. Other societies were already working magic of their own, turning states into empires and cultures into civilizations. Some of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding societies of the fifteenth century were in the Americas, southwest and northern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“The myth of Native Americans’ talent for conservationism before the arrival of the white man is belied by the evidence of the scale of their slaughters.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables

“Yet we keep returning to reason precisely because it occupies the middle place; it is the revisited point on the swing of the pendulum between scepticism and enthusiasm.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“Chinese naval activity, for instance, was aborted after Zheng He’s last voyage, probably as a result of”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

“Magellan’s fleet more ressembled the Flying Dutchman, condemned to sail for what must have seemed like forever without making port.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan

“Experiments, especially the Oslo trials of 1981-84 and the Lipid Research Clinics trials, the results of which were announced in 1984, did show that a low-fat diet could lower high cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of heart disease—but most people do not have a high cholesterol level, regardless of their diet, and more than 50 percent of those with afflicted hearts do not have high cholesterol counts.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables

“sphere. ‘You can only find truth with logic,’ as Chesterton said, ‘if you have already found truth without it.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“Yet despite these advantages, England’s empire remained unlaunched until the seventeenth century. The problem is a dog-in-the-night”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

“[P]art of the pleasure of engaging with a writer is unraveling some allusions and admitting defeat by others.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature

“Truth threatens peace. Those who think they possess it tend to turn into victimizers of the rest, like all the other bullies convinced of the superiority of their own race or class or caste or blood or wisdom.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“From his brimstone bed at break of day A-walking the Devil is gone To visit his snug little farm, the Earth, And see how his stock goes on. —COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY, THE DEVIL’s THOUGHTS”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables

“Their ships were steeds, and they rode the waves like jennets.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

“When the United States wants cheap labor, Mexicans respond. When the employment market north of the border is glutted, the barbed wire gets taut, the border patrols fix bayonets, the vigilantes get busy, and the walls go up.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

“My lineage is for me enough, / Content to live without expensive stuff” was Alonso Manrique’s motto, but he was an accomplished poet.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth Collided

“Great Britain, for instance, is too big and too diverse to be home to a small-island civilization, but in modern times the English—though not, I think, other peoples of the island—have cultivated what might be called a small-island mentality: all their most tiresome history books stress, sometimes in their opening words, that their history is a function of their insularity. They still write and read histories with such titles as Our Island Story and The Offshore Islanders.4The conviction that their island “arose from the azure main” and is like a gem “set in the silver sea” resounds in national songs and scraps of verse which they hear repeatedly. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the English invested heavily in naval security. They created the cult of the “English eccentric”—which is a way of idealizing the outcome of isolation. They have projected an image as “a singular race, one which prides itself on being a little mad.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature

“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said, “Is chiefly what we need: Pepper and vinegar besides Are very good indeed— Now if you’re ready, oysters dear, We can begin to feed.” —LEWIS CARROLL, THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables

“People have traditionally talked about civilization “spreading” from place to place and not happening by other means. This is the result, I think, of two forms of self-deception. First of these is self-congratulation. If we suppose—as people throughout history have regularly supposed—that the way we live represents the climax of human achievement, we need to represent it as unique or, at least, rare: when you find a lot of examples of something that you expect to be unique, you have to explain the effect as the result of diffusion. Yet, in reality, civilization is an ordinary thing, an impulse so widespread that it has again transformed almost every habitable environment. Peoples modest enough in the faceof nature to forgo or severely limit their interventions are much rarer than those, like us, who crush nature into an image of our approving. The attitude of these reticent cultures should therefore be considered much harder to explain than that of the civilized. The second self-deception is belief in what might be called the migrationist fallacy, which powerfully warped previous generations’ picture of the remote past. Our received wisdom about prehistoric times was formulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Europe was enjoying her own great imperial age. The experience of those times convinced self-appointed imperial master-races that civilization was something which descended from superior to inferior peoples. Its vectors were conquerors, colonists, and missionaries. Left to themselves, the barbarians would be mired in cultural immobility. The self-perception of the times was projected, almost without utterance, onto the depiction of the past. Stonehenge was regarded as a marvel beyond the capabilities of the people who really built it—just as to white beholders the ruins of Great Zimbabwe (see page p. 252 ) seemed to have been left by intruders, or the cities of the Maya (see page 158 ) to have been erected under guidance from afar. Early Bronze Age Wessex, with its chieftainly treasures of gold, was putatively assigned to a Mycenean king. The sophistication of Aegean palace life (see page 292 ) was said to have been copied from the Near East. Almost every development, every major change in the prehistoric world was turned by migrationist scholarship into a kind of pre-enactment of later European colonialism and attributed to the influence of migrants or scholars or the irradiation of cultural superiority, warming barbaric darkness into civilized enlightenment. Scholars who had before their eyes the sacred history of the Jews or the migration stories of Herodotus had every reason to trust their own instincts and experience and to chart the progress of civilization on the map. The result was to justify the project of the times: a world of peoples ranked in hierarchical order, sliced and stacked according to abilities supposed to be innate.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature

“Feeling, according to the Winnebag, is the prime mover of the universe, as thought was in the opinion of some ancient Greek sages. Indeed, feeling and thought can be defined in terms of one another. Feeling is thought unformulated; thought is feeling expressed in communicable ways.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed