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The eyes, however, entranced him. Tranquil and serene, yet filled with a wisdom that bore much sorrow, they immediately conjured up comparisons in his mind to Kannon, the Japanese Bodhisattva...

That summer (1812), his (Aaron Burr's) adored grandson, Aaron Burr Alston, died at age ten. He still had his beloved (daughter) Theodosia...Though her husband was now governor of South Carolina, gossip claimed he was abusing her. At the end of 1812, the morose Theodosia sailed for New York to join her father, but she never made it. She died at sea, age twenty-nine, the victim of either a storm or pirates.

For all his fundamental decency, patriotism, and good heart, John Adams struck the lowest blows against Alexander Hamilton. He was preoccupied with Hamilton's illegitimacy and foreign birth and could be quite heartless on the subject....On one occasion...he vilified Hamilton as "the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar."

For all his fundamental decency, patriotism, and good heart, John Adams struck the lowest blows against Alexander Hamilton. He was preoccupied with Hamilton's illegitimacy and foreign birth and could be quite heartless on the subject....On one occasion...he vilified Hamilton as "the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar."

.....but in his heart Lee knew where Moll was now. Dead in a ditch. Raped. Murdered. Some fucker had taken his little girl and killed her....

"...if you will permit my brothers and me to call on your home on Angell Street, we may be able to convince you that there is life in space-not in the shape of men but life, and life possessing a far greater intelligence than that of your most intelligent men."-from THE DARK BROTHERHOOD by HP Lovecraft and August Derleth

....there appears to be no doubt that Hitler read, or at least skimmed, a great deal ( especially if one also counts his pleasure-reading of the cowboys-and-Indians novels of storyteller Karl May). Hitler's style was to cherry-pick materials that suited his developing worldview and his political purposes.

In that offensive (Operation Drumbeat), U-boats pushed up against American shores so closely that crewmen could smell the forest from their decks, watch automobiles drive the parkways, and tune in American radio stations playing the jazz so many of them loved. The first weeks of Drumbeat were a slaughter as U-boats torpedoed unprotected ships. Body parts, oil, and wreckage washed up along the eastern seaboard.

The stoicism of the Roman people owed little to the philosophy of the Greek Stoa, it was in their nature. For the most part they remained deeply superstitious....The average citizen never stepped out of his door in the morning without looking for the omens of the day in the flight of crows overhead or the pattern of leaves underfoot. The taking of omens became an official duty....

"....Life forms rise to dominance because of certain survival factors...Man rose to dominance because of intelligence, but geological history argues that he will not remain dominant forever. And once that is recognized the question naturally rises as to what will come after him. What, we might ask, has a greater survival value than intelligence?..."

Fact is, the tyrannosaur's overrated. He's more a carrion eater than an active predator, though he'll snap you up if he gets the chance. He's less dangerous than some other theropods--the flesh eaters, you know--such as the smaller Gorgosaurus from the period we were in.

Long yellow tendrils were stretching out of a nearby thicket, working their way gingerly towards him. Alarmed, he looked about for a woman to protect him. None was there. Stiffly, his arms so stiff, he pulled his knife from his belt....

One reason for mistreating reporters was the police's desire to have their overall brutality go unrecorded. But beyond that, the press was part of the enemy. Since 1960, when they had been humiliated by the Summerdale police scandal, Chicago police had nursed a grudge.....After Sunday night, some policemen warned their friends among Chicago reporters to be careful, that the word was out to get the press.

The usual homey, nonchalant, backwoodsy nature of Daniel Boone was hardly noticeable. He was sharp, direct, in positive control of how he expressed himself and boring in with a sharpness and penetration that was both annoying and unnerving.

The most accurate measurements to date reveal dark energy as the most prominent thing in town, currently responsible for 68% of all the mass-energy in the universe; dark matter comprises 27%, with regular matter comprising a mere 5 %.

Hadon watched his opponent's eyes. As his father Kumin....had instructed Hadon in his youth, the eyes anticipated action. Watch the eyes and know your foe's moves before he makes them.

"You know," McLaren said..."if I could trade places with my great-great-grandpappy, I'd do it in a second. Life was harder then but in a way it was simpler. He didn't have to pay phone bills, put gas in the car, worry about crime. And he knew what he was living for."

....we...decided that Chicago was a proper "great" city with a proper river and proper big newspaper offices....and lots of friendly Midwesterners making jokes about how dim the Poles were. It had never occurred to me that Polish folk were remarkable in this way, so I was mystified when I was asked for the first time how many Poles it took to change a light bulb...

...we dressed up as soldiers and marched around ( in the Officer Training Corps), trying to look enthusiastic that we'd been given the opportunity to exhibit dog-like obedience. But it was useful to me because I realised after about thirty minutes of this that a military life is not an examined one, and so, according to Socrates, is not worth living, especially if you are a fraidy-cat.

In southwestern Ohio, where I was born, both the Cincinnati and Dayton metropolitan areas have very low rates of church attendance, about the same as ultra-liberal San Francisco....Even as a kid, I'd lie when people asked if I attended church regularly. According to Gallup, I wasn't alone in feeling that pressure.

...Bratislava is grand--it's one of the four elegant capitals on the Danube River (the others are Vienna, Budapest, and Belgrade). From its outskirts, you can easily bike to Austria or Hungary. Slovakia is such a mountainous country that Bratislava feels out of place, resting on a large, flat plain. Moreover, its rich, sophisticated architecture contrasts sharply with Slovakia's rustic mountain towns.

"I cannot go abroad," said K., "I came here in order to stay here....Now what could have attracted me to this desolate land other than a desire to stay." from THE CASTLE

"Intellect is pitted against feeling...It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical."

If the Earth is only a few thousand years old, a devious god must have created the light that is already on its way to Earth from sources millions of light-years away. And as J.B.S. Haldane pointed out, God must have an inordinate fondness for beetles to have created over 250,000 different species.

"Are you familiar with the mycoheterotrophs?"
"Yes."
"Great. Well, I'm interested in a plant called Thismia americana."
"It's extinct."

...few of the Southern individualists cared much about camp duty. The squalor and disorder of a Confederate camp, the informality with which the men treated their commanders, would have given a Union officer the dark blue horrors and did when they saw it. Robert E. Lee never inspected his camps; he shrank from what he would find. And after every battle a few thousand individualists straggled away...

There was now deep concern that the president was being "greatly influenced by the miasma generated by the marshes." Four servants in the White House had already fallen ill with malaria, and Garfield's doctors felt certain that if he were to contract the disease, he would not survive it. In a desperate effort to ward off malaria, they gave him five to ten grains of quinine every day. Unfortunately, the dangers of the

"If you go up in the steeple on a clear day, you can see into Maine. Only you don't want to look at Maine. There's nothing up north except for black smoke and lightning..."