Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Quotes

#1. Truth threatens peace. Those who think they possess it tend to turn into victimizers of the rest, like all the other bullies convinced of the superiority of their own race or class or caste or blood or wisdom.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#2. Their ships were steeds, and they rode the waves like jennets.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#3. Yet we keep returning to reason precisely because it occupies the middle place; it is the revisited point on the swing of the pendulum between scepticism and enthusiasm.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#4. The myth of Native Americans' talent for conservationism before the arrival of the white man is belied by the evidence of the scale of their slaughters.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#5. All definitions of civilization along to a conjugation which goes: I am civilized, you belong to a culture, he is a barbarian.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#6. Chinese naval activity, for instance, was aborted after Zheng He's last voyage, probably as a result of

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#7. My lineage is for me enough, / Content to live without expensive stuff" was Alonso Manrique's motto, but he was an accomplished poet.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#8. To become a great saint, it is no bad first step to be a big sinner.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#9. There has never been nationhood without falsehood.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#10. [P]art of the pleasure of engaging with a writer is unraveling some allusions and admitting defeat by others.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#11. It aligns the cannibals with their real modern counterparts: those who eat "health" diets for self-improvement or worldly success or moral superiority or enhanced beauty or personal purity. Strangely, cannibals turn out to have a lot in common with vegans.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#12. Yet despite these advantages, England's empire remained unlaunched until the seventeenth century. The problem is a dog-in-the-night

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#13. When the United States wants cheap labor, Mexicans respond. When the employment market north of the border is glutted, the barbed wire gets taut, the border patrols fix bayonets, the vigilantes get busy, and the walls go up.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

#14. Like poor immigrants throughout the ages, Jews there adjusted to the jobs no one else would do.

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto