Russell Shorto Quotes

#1. The Dutch were among the earliest adopters of a new technology - the printed book - and

Russell Shorto

#2. He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it.

Russell Shorto

#3. We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death.

Russell Shorto

#4. For individual freedom can come about only, can be conceived only, if there is some sense of security to life.

Russell Shorto

#5. It was the Dutch of this era who invented the idea of the home as a personal, intimate space; one might say they invented coziness.

Russell Shorto

#6. ...the curious Dutch classification gedogen, which means 'technically illegal but officially tolerated.

Russell Shorto

#7. Manhattan is where America began.

Russell Shorto

#8. A basic component of individual rights is the right to own property.

Russell Shorto

#9. They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.

Russell Shorto

#10. Embedded in this outlook is an idea of the body as a machine, so that illness is seen as a breakdown of the machine, healing involves repairing the broken parts, and a doctor is a kind of mechanic with medications as his or her tools.

Russell Shorto

#11. Devote what time I may still have to live to no other occupation than that of endeavoring to acquire some knowledge of Nature, which shall be of such a kind as to enable us there from to deduce rules in medicine of greater certainty than those in present use.

Russell Shorto

#12. So how, in an increasingly interconnected world, do we integrate and still keep our values?

Russell Shorto

#13. Where land was controlled by noblemen and/or the Church in other parts of Europe, in the province of Holland, circa 1500, only 5 percent of the land was owned by nobles, while peasants owned 45 percent of it.

Russell Shorto

#14. You could look at the work of any Dutch master for an idea of the morning light we cycle through. There is a white cleanness to it, a rinsed quality. It's a sober light, without, for example, any of the orange particulate glow you get from the Mediterranean sun.

Russell Shorto

#15. It was possible, as far as they knew, that the western shore, which in fifty years' time would be christened New Jersey, was in fact the backdoor of China, that India, with its steamy profusion of gods and curries, lay just beyond those bluffs.

Russell Shorto

#16. There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might "go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation").

Russell Shorto