Steve Inskeep > Quotes

“Heritage is a matter of the stories we choose to tell about our past, as well as the stories we overlook.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“Jinnah told my father", he (Ardeshir Cowasjee) said, "that each government of Pakistan would be worse than the one that preceded it.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“When we build a city, we take our grandest dreams as well as our deepest anxieties and set them in concrete for the next generation.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“If you come to Karachi for a few days you will hate it, but if you come to Karachi for forty days, you will love it and never want to leave.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“One measure decreed that when ships docked at Charleston, any free black sailors on board must be jailed so they could not carry messages to black people onshore. When a Supreme Court justice found the imprisonments unconstitutional, South Carolina openly defied the ruling, saying that stopping “insubordination” was “paramount” to “all laws” and “all constitutions.” Baffled by this early example of a state nullifying federal law, national officials did nothing.”
― Steve Inskeep, Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab

“Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the capital and called upon Mrs. Frémont. She was “excellent company,” he said, showing “good sense and good humour,” but also expressing “musical indignation” as she was “incessantly accusing the Government of the vast wrong that had been done to the General.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“Karachi has been a destination for some of the most dramatic migrations of all.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“he learned to read through a flaw in the slave system: it was run by people susceptible to human feelings.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“Their walks would have been a chance to get to know each other, because for all they had been through, they had not been through much together.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“Each of the eastern lawmakers dreamed of returning to Congress as one of California’s first United States senators. The Post correspondent sarcastically marveled that the men could “understand the wants and necessities of California after only a few weeks’ residence in the Territory! . . . It is to be regretted, however, that they could not have found some Territory nearer home worthy of their patriotism and sacrifices.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“As a private individual in 1849, he saw his interests clearly, acted sensibly, and employed people with the skills he needed. As a legislator in 1850, he was part of a system, joining a group of men who were thinking in the abstract about categories of people who were not like them.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“Jessie emphasized that slavery corrupted “the temper of children,” meaning the white children of slave owners. “I would as soon place my children in the midst of small pox, as rear them under the influences of slavery.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“As an officer who neither attended West Point nor even served much around other soldiers, he failed to grasp the depth of the military’s tribalism. The army and navy served the same country but had separate chains of command, rivaled each other for funding and glory, and viewed each other’s cultures as alien.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“Writing history is a relay, which is also true of history itself. We build, if we can, on the legacies that are left us.”
― Steve Inskeep, Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America

“From 1947, the country had unwittingly conducted a vast human experiment: what would happen if a diverse place suddenly cleansed itself of many of its minorities, so that almost everyone was, on the surface, the same?

Now the results of the experiment were coming in.

Muslims, the single "nation" championed by their leaders just a few years before, proved to be strikingly diverse. They always had been. Now some looked within their numbers and began singling out new minorities to replace the ones they had lost.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“Indian removal, Marshall’s ruling was the”
― Steve Inskeep, Jacksonland: President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab

“but having shamed another man, he could no longer take counsel of his own fears.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“Is it possible to leave Karachi after living here for so long?”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“There was a gap between Captain Frémont and his men, which was reflected in the differing stories they told. His men talked with brutal frankness; either they did not know that people outside their world might judge their acts to be wrong, or they did not care. John Frémont knew and cared. The life his men led was not quite his; it was a life he visited, knowing he would go home to his world of books and newspapers, cities and civilization.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War

“Newspapers,” he declared, “are the school of public instruction.”
― Steve Inskeep, Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War