Eric Burns > Quotes

“The library is not, as some would have it, a place for the retiring of disposition or faint of heart. It is not an ivory tower or a quiet room in a sanitarium facing away from the afternoon sun. It is, rather, a command center, a power base. A board room, a war room. An Oval Office for all who preside over their own destinies. One does not retreat from the world here; one prepares to join it at an advantage.”
― Eric Burns, Joy of Books

“The serious reader in the age of technology is a rebel by definition: a protester without a placard, a Luddite without hammer or bludgeon. She reads on planes to picket the antiseptic nature of modern travel, on commuter trains to insist on individualism in the midst of the herd, in hotel rooms to boycott the circumstances that separate her from her usual sources of comfort and stimulation, during office breaks to escape from the banal conversation of office mates, and at home to revolt against the pervasive and mind-deadening irrelevance of television.”
― Eric Burns, Joy of Books

“Give a man a hoe and he is something to exploit. Give him a book and he is something to fear.”
― Eric Burns, Joy of Books

“Said the Broadway star Billie Burke, “The Roaring Twenties were very pleasant if you did not stop to think.” Most people didn’t stop to think. And still don’t, as they look back. If they did, they would see not just the pervasiveness of hardship throughout the decade, but the horrible prelude it proved to be—for at its opposite end, there was a different kind of explosion on Wall Street. The stock market crashed, and much of the United States crashed along with it. The value of investments dropped like never before, never since; the term “Depression” described not just the ruination of financial accounts, but the attitude of an entire nation, so many people so painfully victimized by a lack of income and, with it, a lack of opportunity. The New Deal helped, but it took another Great War, after yet another decade, to jump-start economic growth again. Ten years, it might have been, from Prohibition to stock-market crash, but they held a century’s worth of turmoil and jubilation, irrationality and intrigue, optimism and injustice. It all began in 1920.”
― Eric Burns, 1920

“HAVING WON THE RIGHT TO vote, a number of women believed that they had in the process won the right to redefine the very notion of femininity. Geoffrey Perrett summarizes: Before the First World War women were arrested for smoking cigarettes in public, for using profanity, for appearing on public beaches without stockings, for driving automobiles without a man beside them, for wearing outlandish attire (for example, shorts, slacks, men’s hats), and for not wearing their corsets. Women accused of such offenses against public order and common decency were summoned before the courts, not only of small towns, but of big cities such as Chicago. In less than a decade these prosecutions stopped, simply because they seemed as absurd as they were futile.”
― Eric Burns, 1920

“the most famous people in the world today don’t address the world’s most pressing needs. Rather, they distract us from them.They provide amusement, not sustenance. They”
― Eric Burns, Virtue, Valor, and Vanity: The Inside Story of the Founding Fathers and the Price of a More Perfect Union

“United we stand, divided we fall. Let us not split into factions which must destroy that union upon which our existence hangs. Let”
― Eric Burns, Virtue, Valor, and Vanity: The Inside Story of the Founding Fathers and the Price of a More Perfect Union

“too much at stake in those days for the luxury of restraint.”
― Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism