Ozymandias > Recent Status Updates

We must mention that the Egyptian word for “cat” was spelled “miw.” How it was vocalized we may safely leave to the imagination of any cat-owning reader.

“I must differ with the scholar who deduced that Thutmose must have died young, since no grown man would lavish such affection on a cat. (He is probably a dog person.)”

“If these Sakkara tombs had superstructures, they have vanished, but in the galleries were found seals bearing the names of the first three kings of the Second Dynasty—Hetepsekhemwi, Raneb, and Nynetjer. It's not necessary to remember these names; they will not turn up again in these pages. I just put them in to show how thorough I am.”

“There were… wives and fathers hoping to get back to their own families, as was the case with Mrs. Arthur Luck of Worcester, Massachusetts, traveling with her two sons, Kenneth Luck and Elbridge Luck, ages eight and nine, to rejoin her husband, a mining engineer who awaited them in England. Why in the midst of great events there always seems to be a family so misnamed is one of the imponderables of history.”

“It was not to be a sporting encounter but a matter of life and death. In the iron-willed, not very intelligent little man in the Mikasa Japan had an appropriately ruthless officer to lead the fleet.”

This seems a very odd way to refer to Admiral Togo. Not sending off great vibes for impartiality. I think even his enemies would have admitted he was very good.

“And when we congratulate ourselves on seeing through the darkened window that separates us from another civili-zation, heartened to discover the familiar forms that lie hidden among the shadows on the other side, sometimes we do so without ever realizing that we are only gazing at our own reflection.”

Grim

“I have a strong fellow-feeling for a craftsman who said of his most successful work, Derby Day, that the acrobats, the nigger minstrels, gypsy fortune tellers, to say nothing of carriages filled with pretty women, together with the sporting element, seemed to offer abundant material for the line of art to which I felt obliged… to devote myself”

Sometimes the past really is another country…

“Austin was apparently impervious to criticism, and this is lucky, for nobody has had a good word for him since his death in 1913.”

Oof

“Contemplating fascism, we see most clearly how the twentieth century contrasted with the nineteenth, and what the twenty-first century must avoid.”

Well we already screwed that up and even faster than the twentieth century.

“And what to do with Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MACARTHUR? He's worse than the Cabots and the Lodges-they at least talked to one another before they told God what to do. Mac tells God right off. It is a very great pity that we have stuffed shirts like that in key positions.”

-Harry Truman (1945)

“This was a Groundhog Day conflict, in which contests for a portion of elephant grass, jungle, or rice paddy were repeated not merely month after month, but year upon year, with no Andie MacDowell as prize in the last reel.”

Lol

“If an opium consignee was lucky, the responsible mandarin would simply demand a businesslike bribe per box of opium. If he were less fortunate, he would suffer a lecture administered first on the evils of the opium crade, or perhaps a personal reading of the emperor's latest edict on the subject, then be allowed to hand over the bribe.”

I’m really enjoying the writing here.

“Fluent in both self-deception and China’s south-eastern dialects, he had more interesting offers than he could handle.”

Tress looked toward Crow. And then, Tress took the singular step that separated her from people in most stories. The act, it might be said, that defined her as a hero. She did something so incredible, I can barely express its majesty.
I should consider this more, Tress thought to herself, and not jump to conclusions.

“Your hair is the color of sunlight, if sunlight were light brown,” Charlie said. It might be said he had a way with words. In that his words often got away.

Diary entry of a teenager as the eastern front collapses and Soviets swarm into Germany:
“Still having to learn at such a time? Horrible!”
Complaining about school as the world ends. Some things never change.

Five years ago it would have seemed so alien that the Rightwing press declared that the real victims in an attempted coup where twenty died were those who led the violent uprising because the government overreached by defending itself from “the People” (those of course who support democracy, socialism, or Jews are by definition not “People”). Now of course that’s just American politics.

“Marcus Cocceius Firmus, a legionary centurion in command at Auchendavy on the Antonine Wall, evidently had a female slave.”

Err… do I want to know how we know that?

“When it comes to John of Cappadocia, John Lydus' expostulations warrant the same skepticism as many of the things that Procopius has to say about Theodora or Justinian—such as Procopius's assertion that the emperor's head separated itself from his body and roamed the palace at night.”

I don’t see what’s so strange about that…

“Hypocrite… Murder made you. Murder took you out of the back streets and put you where you sit now. Murder! What is it? It is a word.”

-Marat sounding very Marat

Emperor Napoleon at the height of his power: “Gentlemen, I know your dedication to the power of the throne. All France is chastened. I know only one man who is not, that is Lafayette: He has never retreated a line. You see him quiet; well, I tell you, he is quite ready to start again.”

That’s a pretty ringing endorsement to a non-Napoleon fancier like me.

On enlistment before Antietam:
“Underage boys would write ‘18’ on a slip of paper and put it inside a shoe; then, when asked if they weren’t pretty young, they could truthfully say, ‘I’m over 18.’”

“If a man demands justice, not merely as an abstract concept, but in setting up the life of a society, and if he holds, further, that within that society (however defined) all men have equal rights, then the odds are that his views, sooner rather than later, are going to set something or someone on fire.”

“Cassius… saw monarchy as the target. Brutus disagreed. He saw only the monarch.”

“I have generally used Latinized forms of Greek proper names, hence Cadmea rather than Kadmeia, but there are exceptions. There are always exceptions.”

Yup.

“France’s alliance with England is as natural as that of man and horse, just so long as one takes care not ending up the horse.”

-Talleyrand, bless him

“He lacks so many of the qualities usually to be found in a man of merit—sound judgement, knowledge [of men and the country], the ability to express himself, and political experience.”

-Charles de Rémusat on Louis Napoleon

“One must also face a very real truth, one quite contrary to that noble view, and that is that all war—apart from that of legitimate self-defense of one’s home and nation, is in fact nothing but the act of a barbarian, which is only distinguished from that of savages and wild beasts, by more satisfactory lies regarding its alleged necessity.”

Quite a shift from former king Louis Napoleon

“This is the first time in my life that I’ve had a real chance to yield to the temptations of a great city. What’s the use of a great city having temptations if fellows don’t yield to them? Makes it so bally discouraging for the great city.”

“I’m not absolutely certain of my facts, but I fancy it’s Shakespeare – or, if not, it’s some equally brainy bird – who says it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with things in general that Fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.”

Err… it’s uncannily word for word.