Logan > Logan's Quotes

“When the Common Era began—by the year one, that is—eight out of every ten humans lived between the Atlantic coast of Europe and the shores of the South China Sea.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“Of the House of Representatives, Rep. James G. Blaine later remarked, “There is no place where so little deference is paid to reputation previously acquired, or to eminence won outside; no place where so little consideration is shown for the feelings or the failures of beginners. What a man gains, he gains by sheer force of his own character,”
― Fergus M. Bordewich, Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America

“The past,” as the British novelist L. P. Hartley wrote, “is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
― Fergus M. Bordewich, Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America

“In the year 800, traditional estimates say that about 90 percent of our species lived in the temperate belt of Africa and Eurasia, somewhere north of the equator, and another 6 percent lived in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly along the perimeter of the continent. The Americas supposedly had about 3 percent of the world’s population, although that number is pretty speculative and much disputed.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“One of the few things we do know for sure about Teotihuacan is that its name was not Teotihuacan. That name means “city of the gods,” and it’s what the Aztecs called the place centuries later when they stumbled across its deserted ruins—for like so many other great Mesoamerican urban centers, this city was flourishing and then it wasn’t.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“But there is a distinction to be made between tools and machines. The line may be murky, but it’s there. Think of it this way: tools help us humans do stuff; machines do stuff and we humans help them do it, by shoveling coal into their bellies, by replacing their worn-out parts when necessary, by feeding lumber into their saw teeth, whatever they need.”
― Tamim Ansary, The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

“Now suspicious, Wills called the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police. The nearest uniformed officers responded to the police dispatcher that they were busy putting gas in their squad car (although they were, in fact, drinking at a nearby bar),”
― Suzanne Mettler, Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy