Scott > Scott's Quotes

“The whole industrial strength of the United States, should it be directed toward war-making, would constitute power never dreamed of before in the history of Armageddon. . . . It would be a struggle in which all our strength would be needed—and the penalty for being unable to use all our strength would be the loss of everything we had.”
― A.J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Ford Motor Company, and Their Epic Quest to Arm an America at War

“The Fords were the first in the country to lay a concrete landing strip, the first to build an airport hotel for out-of-town flyboys (the 108-room Dearborn Inn, which is still there), and the first private company to take on a US Air Mail Service contract.”
― A.J. Baime, The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Ford Motor Company, and Their Epic Quest to Arm an America at War

“For, in the end, Brearley did manage to create cutlery from stainless steel, and it’s the transparent protective layer of chromium oxide that makes the spoon tasteless, since your tongue never actually touches the metal and your saliva cannot react with it; it has meant that we are one of the first generations who have not had to taste our cutlery.”
― Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

“The appreciation of wine was based solely on the way it tasted. The invention of drinking glasses meant that the color, transparency, and clarity of wine became important, too. We are used to seeing what we drink, but this was new to the Romans, and they loved it.”
― Mark Miodownik, Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

“as if the cops expected the big gray sedan to start up by itself, like that old Plymouth in the horror movie,”
― Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes

“When I approached him a second time with the cameras rolling, Munson grabbed the microphone and suggested I perform a physical impossibility.”
― Jim Bouton, Ball Four

“Irish people will tell you that, because of their sad history of dispossession, owning a home is not just a way to avoid paying rent but a mark of freedom. In their rush to freedom, the Irish built their own prisons. And their leaders helped them to do it.”
― Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

“We’ll see if he still feels that way the first time the selection committee leaves out Alabama.”
― Stewart Mandel, The Thinking Fan's Guide to the College Football Playoff

“When the day inevitably comes that a Pac-12 team beats out an SEC team for the last playoff spot, you can be sure of two things: 1) Callers to The Paul Finebaum Show the next day will utter things never before heard on radio and 2) the SEC will go to nine conference games, stat.”
― Stewart Mandel, The Thinking Fan's Guide to the College Football Playoff

“Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“So they became superpatriots. And to prove themselves right-minded, they were more than willing to sacrifice the lives of others, even their fellow Jews. They were like the Vichy government in France, collaborators who held on to their influence and position at the expense of their fellow countrymen.”
― Kirk Douglas, I Am Spartacus!: Making a Film, Breaking the Blacklist

“I do not deny my past. I have been a great wanderer from what is right, but at least I know it and hope that the knowledge has not come too late.”
― Christopher Hibbert, The Borgias And Their Enemies: 1431-1519

“The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“intellectual capacity is no guarantee against being dead wrong.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The drowning and devastation of the city took just about ten minutes.”
― David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood

“The main thing was to know the world, every twenty-five years or so, back for a couple hundred years, and if you had that info handy, always there under your belt, then you could figure out the gaps.”
― William Goldman, Marathon Man

“I was scared,” he observed. Unlike his soft-edged mother, Buck and Marie were extraordinarily gifted at instilling fear; their livelihoods depended upon it.”
― Scott Saul, Becoming Richard Pryor

“Consider the Iraq War. It was executed primarily on U.S. claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was in league with al Qaeda. To be sure, there was more to it than that—politics, oil, and perhaps revenge—but it was the al Qaeda and weapons claims that sealed the deal. Eight years, $800 billion, and nearly 4,500 American deaths later—along with at least 100,000 Iraqi fatalities—it was tempting to consider what might have happened had the purveyors of those claims admitted that they did not in fact “know” them to be true.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Think Like a Freak

“THE TRAIN CARRYING THE BODY OF ELLEN AXSON Wilson pulled into the station at Rome, Georgia, at 2:30 in the afternoon, Tuesday, August 11, 1914, under gunmetal skies, amid the peal of bells.”
― Erik Larson, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

“The lesson here, and through the years I’ve seen it repeated over and over again, is that a relatively small group of agitators, especially when convinced God is on their side, can move corporate America to quake with fear and make decisions in total disregard of the Constitution that protects against such decisions.”
― Norman Lear, Even This I Get to Experience

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. —G. K. Chesterton”
― Andrew Carroll, Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

“Obviously, approximately 1/3 of Republican voters do have a perfectly reasonable grasp on reality. Like myself, they accept that the planet is more than 5,000 years old, that Iraq was not behind 9/11; they accept that bigotry is unproductive and usually caused by ignorance, and they prefer facts to myth. But they still vote Republican.”
― Patrick Andendall, Stupidparty Math v. Myth: Unmasking the Destructive Forces Eroding American Democracy

“For readers, one of life’s most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers – not just capable of doing it, but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels.”
― Stephen King, Finders Keepers

“All 2,100 miles of the trail, as well as side trails, footbridges, signs, blazes, and shelters, are maintained by volunteers—indeed, the AT is said to be the largest volunteer-run undertaking on the planet.”
― Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

“These tariffs were a public slap in the face to America’s most loyal friend, delivered with a private wink that it was really just a charade. This decision, Meyer fumed, was reprehensible.”
― Kurt Eichenwald, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars

“The twin shocks of 9/11 and the Great Recession seem mentally to have unhinged a portion of the American people and much of the political class. The following years were consumed by crazy arguments about the president’s birth certificate, death panels, and voters shouting that the government must get its hands off their government-provided Medicare.”
― Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government

“Reading through the reviews, I feel as though I am witnessing a much more erudite and informed preview of the Fox News/MSNBC shouting matches of today.”
― Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1972

“In his book Why Geography Matters, the geographer Harm de Blij argues that the West’s three great challenges of our time—Islamist terrorism, global warming, and the rise of China—are all problems of geography. An informed citizenry has to understand place, not because place is more important than other kinds of knowledge but because it forms the foundation for so much other knowledge.”
― Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks

“He’s the reason I have so few rules on my team. He told me not to make any rules because that way if a bad kid screws up you get rid of him. If a good kid screws up you do what you have to do and let it go at that. Rules just get you in trouble.”
― John Feinstein, Season on the Brink: A Year with Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers

“the greatest danger to America’s future came from self-serving opportunism masquerading as patriotism. At”
― Nathaniel Philbrick, Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution