Susan Wise Bauer > Quotes

“The only men ruthless enough to fight against tyranny were themselves inclined to it.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

“Civilization began in the Fertile Crescent, not because it was an Edenic place overflowing with natural resources, but because it was so hostile to settlement that a village of any size needed careful management to survive.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

“What is classical education? It is language-intensive—not image-focused. It demands that students use and understand words, spoken and written, rather than communicating primarily through images. It is history-intensive, providing students with a comprehensive view of human endeavor from the beginning until now. It trains the mind to analyze and draw conclusions. It both requires and develops self-discipline—the ability to tackle a difficult task that doesn’t promise an immediate reward, for the sake of future gain. It produces literate, curious, intelligent students who have a wide range of interests and the ability to follow up on them. The Well-Trained Mind”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home

“Pippin ordered Childeric III tonsured and sent to a monastery, where he died five years later, the last of the Merovingians.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

“Pippin was crowned the first king of the Carolingian dynasty in the city of Soissons, in a brand-new sacred ceremony that involved anointing with holy oil in the manner of an Old Testament theocratic king.*”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

“The goal of classical self-education is this: not merely to “stuff” facts into your head, but to understand them. Incorporate them into your mental framework. Reflect on their meaning for the internal life.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

“The idea that fast reading is good reading is a twentieth-century weed, springing out of the stony farmland cultivated by the computer manufacturers.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

“The initial small step is simple: Rather than making a sweeping determination to tackle the Great Books (all of them), decide to begin on one of the reading lists in Part II. As you read each book, you’ll follow the pattern of the trivium. First you’ll try to understand the book’s basic structure and argument; next, you’ll evaluate the book’s assertions; finally, you’ll form an opinion about the book’s ideas. You’ll have to exercise these three skills of reading—understanding, analysis, and evaluation—differently for each kind of book.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

“A debt-free bachelor's degree is, as it turns out, priceless: As Jane Austen puts it, it sets you up forever. My friends were still paying off their school loans in their forties. I never had any school debt at all. Because I had no debt, I could choose my life, and choose my adventure.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education

“Yet because we can read the newspaper or Time or Stephen King without difficulty, we tend to think that we should be able to go directly into Homer or Henry James without any further preparation. And when we stumble, grow confused or weary, we take this as proof of our mental inadequacy: We’ll never be able to read the Great Books.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

“Scientists who grapple with biological origins are still affected by Platonic idealism today; Charles Lyell’s nineteenth-century geological theories still influence our understanding of human evolution; quantum theory is still wrestling with Francis Bacon’s methods. To interpret science, we have to know something about its past. We have to continually ask not just “What have we discovered?” but also “Why did we look for it?” In no other way can we begin to grasp why we prize, or disregard, scientific knowledge in the way we do; or be able to distinguish between the promises that science can fulfill and those we should receive with some careful skepticism. Only then will we begin to understand science.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory

“As you read, you should follow this three-part process: jot down specific phrases, sentences, and paragraphs as you come across them; when you’ve finished your reading, go back and write a brief summary about what you’ve learned; and then write your own reactions, questions, and thoughts.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

“The good general not only deceives the enemy himself, but assumes that his enemy is always deceiving him:”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

“In a special file cabinet drawer or dedicated file box, keep six file folders for each high-school student. Label them: Course Descriptions Books Read Papers Written Recommendations Extracurricular Activities Other”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home

“Underline in your books, jot notes in the margins, and turn the corners of your pages down. Public education is a beautiful dream, but public classrooms too often train students not to mark, write in, disfigure, or in any way make books permanently their own. You're a grownup now, so buy your own books if you possibly can. In my opinion, a cheap paperback filled with your own notes is worth five times as much as a beautiful collector's edition.”
― Susan Wise Bauer

“To be female and on the throne during the collapse of a Medieval Kingdom generally elicited accusations of lust, corruption, and general visciousness., The queen's sex life becomes a convenient explanation for the end of an era.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

“Anthropologists can speculate about human behavior; archaeologists, about patterns of settlement; philosophers and theologians, about the motivations of “humanity” as an undifferentiated mass. But the historian’s task is different: to look for particular human lives that give flesh and spirit to abstract assertions about human behavior.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

“The Huns had arrived at the distant edges of the western world. To the Romans, who had never seen them, they were as frightening as earthquake and tsunami, an evil force that could barely be resisted. Historians of the time had no idea exactly where these frightening newcomers came from, but they were sure it was somewhere awful. The Roman historian Procopius insists that they were descended from witches who had sexual congress with demons, producing Huns: a “stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance of human speech.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

“Today, most people "go to work." But back at the beginning of the nineteenth century, "going to work" was a brand new idea. Families had always worked together in their homes.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners

“the twelfth-century Song of Roland, which turns the bloody incident into a major conspiracy between the Arabs of Zaragoza and a traitor within Charlemagne’s own camp.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

“deceit became a way of life:”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

“When you read, you develop wisdom—or, in Mortimer Adler’s words, “become enlightened.” “To be informed,” Adler writes in How to Read a Book, “is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

“No one likes to be condescended to, so it’s hardly surprising that so many high school students develop a loathing for the modernist novels they’re forced to read in senior English and go to the movies instead. (Movies have plots, after all.) They’re being good postmodernists.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

“One of the first Italians to give a name to the reawakened interest in Greek and Roman learning was the poet Petrarch, who announced early in the 1340s that poets and scholars were ready to lead the cities of Italy back to the glory days of Rome. Classical learning had declined, Petrarch insisted, into darkness and obscurity. Now was the time for that learning to be rediscovered: a rebirth, a Renaissance.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

“Technology can do a great deal to make information gathering easier, but it can do little to simplify the gathering of wisdom.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had

“As each German and Italian and Frankish nobleman arrived in Constantinople with his own private army, ready to cross over the Bosphorus Strait and face the enemy, Alexius had demanded a sacred oath. Whatever “cities, countries or forces he might in future subdue . . . he would hand over to the officer appointed by the emperor.” They were, after all, there to fight for Christendom; and Alexius Comnenus was the ruler of Christendom in the east.1 Just as Alexius had feared, the chance to build private kingdoms in the Holy Land proved too tempting. The first knight to bite the apple was the Norman soldier Bohemund, who had arrived in Constantinople at the start of the First Crusade and immediately became one of the foremost commanders of the Crusader armies. Spearheading the capture of the great city Antioch in 1098, Bohemund at once named himself its prince and flatly refused to honor his oath. (“Bohemund,” remarked Alexius’s daughter and biographer, Anna, “was by nature a liar.”) By 1100, Antioch had been joined by two other Crusader kingdoms—the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the County of Edessa—and Bohemund himself was busy agitating the Christians of Asia Minor against Byzantium. By 1103, Bohemund was planning a direct attack against the walls of Constantinople itself.2 To mount this assault, Bohemund needed to recruit more soldiers. The most likely source for reinforcements was Italy; Bohemund’s late father, Robert Guiscard, had conquered himself a kingdom in the south of Italy (the grandly named “Dukedom of Apulia and Calabria”), and Bohemund, who had been absent from Italy since heading out on crusade, had theoretically inherited its crown. Alexius knew this as well as Bohemund did, so Byzantine ships hovered in the Mediterranean, waiting to intercept any Italy-bound ships from the principality of Antioch. So Bohemund was forced to be sneaky. Anna Comnena tells us that he spread rumors everywhere: “Bohemond,” it was said, “is dead.” . . . When he perceived that the story had gone far enough, a wooden coffin was made and a bireme prepared. The coffin was placed on board and he, a still breathing “corpse,” sailed away from Soudi, the port of Antioch, for Rome. . . . At each stop the barbarians tore out their hair and paraded their mourning. But inside Bohemond, stretched out at full length, was . . . alive, breathing air in and out through hidden holes. . . . [I]n order that the corpse might appear to be in a state of rare putrefaction, they strangled or cut the throat of a cock and put that in the coffin with him. By the fourth or fifth day at the most, the horrible stench was obvious to anyone who could smell. . . . Bohemond himself derived more pleasure than anyone from his imaginary misfortune.3 Bohemund was a rascal and an opportunist, but he almost always got what he wanted; when he arrived in Italy and staged a victorious resurrection, he was able to rouse great public enthusiasm for his fight against Byzantium. In fact, his conquest of Antioch in the east had given him hero stature back in Italy. People swarmed to see him, says one contemporary historian, “as if they were going to see Christ himself.”4”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

“William Penn planned to use this land for a colony where Quaker ideas would be followed. He wanted the settlers to be like brothers, all equal to each other. The capital city would be called the City of Brotherly Love--in Greek, Philadelphia.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, Early Modern Times: From Elizabeth the First to the Forty-Niners

“In fact, far from being phonetic, hieroglyphs were designed to be indecipherable unless you possessed the key to their meaning. The Egyptian priests, who were guardians of this information, patrolled the borders of their knowledge in order to keep this tool in their own hands. Ever since, the mastery of writing and reading has been an act of power”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

“The Magna Carta, the Great Charter confirmed by John at Runnymede, bears the date June 15, 1215;”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

“The Sabine they picked was Numa Pompilius.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome