Brandon Porter

“The Mongol army had accomplished in a mere two years what the European Crusaders from the West and the Seljuk Turks from the East had failed to do in two centuries of sustained effort. They had conquered the heart of the Arab world. No other non-Muslim troops would conquer Baghdad or Iraq again until the arrival of the American and British forces in 2003.”
― Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

“A thousand days of training to develop, ten thousand days of training to polish. You must examine all this well.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, The Complete Book of Five Rings

“uncomfortable truth of libraries throughout the ages: no society has ever been satisfied with the collections inherited from previous generations. What we will frequently see in this book is not so much the apparently wanton destruction of beautiful artefacts so lamented by previous studies of library history, but neglect and redundancy, as books and collections that represented the values and interests of one generation fail to speak to the one that follows. The fate of many collections was to degrade in abandoned attics and ruined buildings, even if only as the prelude to renewal and rebirth in the most unexpected places.”
― Andrew Pettegree, The Library: A Fragile History

“If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it. – If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving. – Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average. – Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives”
― Robert Kurson, Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship