SengMing Tan

“It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.”
― Will Durant, The Lessons of History

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Cristina Belgiojoso, who was so close to Lafayette at the end of his life, watched Lafayette’s reputation tarnished by the hands of more cynical commentators like Chateaubriand. “When he is given his place in history,” she said in 1850, “it will be recognized, I am sure of this, that his political mistakes were caused by too high opinion of the human species and of men; he judged the latter according to himself. One can understand the serious errors he made in attributing to others the integrity, the uprightness, and the sincerity that were only in him.”57”
― Mike Duncan, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette and the Age of Revolution

“Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”
― Will Durant, The Lessons of History