Joseph Moore

“Lafayette said to Mauroy, “Don’t you believe that the people are united by the love of virtue and liberty?” Mauroy replied the Americans were not some novel species, they were simply transplanted Europeans “who brought to a savage land the views and prejudices of their respective homelands.” He proceeded to give Lafayette a brief moral history of European colonization: “Fanaticism, the insatiable desire to get rich, and misery—those are, unfortunately, the three sources from which flow that nearly uninterrupted stream of immigrants who, sword in hand, go to cut down, under an alien sky, forests more ancient than the world, watering a still virgin land with the blood of its savage inhabitants, and fertilizing with thousands of scattered cadavers the fields they conquered through crime.”3 This, Mauroy informed Lafayette, was the reality of the “new world” toward which they sailed.”
― Mike Duncan, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette and the Age of Revolution

“It also means that cosmology doesn’t really have a well-defined concept of “now.” Or rather, the “now” you experience is highly specific to you, to where you are and to what you are doing. What does it mean to say “that supernova is going off now” if we see the light of it now, and we can watch the star explode now, but that light has been traveling for millions of years? The thing we’re watching is essentially fully in the past, but the “now” for that exploded star is unobservable to us, and we won’t receive any knowledge of it for millions of years, which makes it, to us, not “now,” but the future.
When we think of the universe as existing in spacetime—a kind of all-encompassing universal grid in which space is three axes and time is a fourth—we can just think of the past and the future as distant points on the same fabric, stretching across the cosmos from its infancy to its end. To someone sitting at a different point on this fabric, an event that is part of the future to us might be the distant past to them. And the light (or any information) from an event that we won’t see for millennia is already streaming across spacetime toward us “now.” Is that event in the future, or the past, or, perhaps, both? It all depends on perspective.”
― Katie Mack, The End of Everything

“There was nothing wrong with the conclusion . . . that Germany and continental Europe west of Russia would only be able to hold their own . . . if Europe pulled together. And a united Europe would fall almost automatically under the leadership of the strongest power – Germany . . . [But] German leadership over a united Europe in order to brave the coming giant economic and political power blocs would have to overcome the imagined reluctance [sic] of Europeans to domination by any one of their peers. Germany would have to persuade Europe to accept German leadership . . . to make crystal clear that the overall interest of Europe would coincide with the enlightened self-interest of Germany . . . in order to achieve in the years after 1900 something like the position of the Federal Republic today.91”
― Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I

“Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come.”
― Andrew Roberts, Napoleon: A Life