Tony Horwitz Quotes

#1. I am an agnostic on most matters of faith, but on the subject of maps I have always been a true believer. It is on the map, therefore it is, and I am.

Tony Horwitz

#2. Even aimless journeys have a purpose ...

Tony Horwitz

#3. It is difficult to gaze in awe at the wonders of ancient Egypt with modern Egypt tugging so insistently at your sleeve.

Tony Horwitz

#4. We were raised Methodists," Sue said. "But we converted to the Confederacy. There wasn't time for both."
"War is hell," Ed deadpanned. "And it just might send us there.

Tony Horwitz

#5. The best you can do is catch an echo of the man. You can never reach out and touch him.

Tony Horwitz

#6. Hardcore chicken!

Tony Horwitz

#7. During a mock battle attended by President Warren Harding in 1921, Marine Corps General Smedley D. Butler exhumed the arm [of Stonewall Jackson; he didn't believe it was buried there] and reburied it in a metal box.

Tony Horwitz

#8. When Union litter-bearers climbed out of their trenches, four days after the assault, they found only two men still alive amongst the piles of stinking corpses. One burial party discovered a dead Yankee with a diary in his pocket, the last entry of which read: June 3. Cold Harbor. I was killed.

Tony Horwitz

#9. You asked how I'd define prejudice. That's it. Making assumptions about people you've never met.

Tony Horwitz

#10. Everywhere, it seemed, I had to explore two pasts and two presents; one white, one black, separate and unreconcilable. The past had poisoned the present and the present, in turn, now poisoned remembrance of things past.

Tony Horwitz

#11. Cook," the historian Bernard Smith speculates, "increasingly realised that wherever he went he was spreading the curses much more liberally than the benefits of European civilization.

Tony Horwitz

#12. I couldn't think of another city in the world that lined its streets with stone leviathans honoring failed rebels against the state.

Tony Horwitz

#13. Cook, judging from his journals, was not a pious man. A product of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, he valued reason above all else, and showed little patience for what he called "Priest craft" and "superstition.

Tony Horwitz

#14. John Brown, raised by disciplinarians, became one himself.

Tony Horwitz

#15. There are people one knows and people one doesn't. One shouldn't cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter.

Tony Horwitz

#16. Seven severely depressed prisoners were listed as having died of nostalgia.

Tony Horwitz