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Franciszek Kowalksi, 48 years of age, slender, slightly balding, with a ruddy complexion, prominent cheekbones, and blue eyes, took a drink you won't believe how rarely....

He saw with a simple heart and a spacious mind the frontiersman, the hunter, the trapper, the whaler and the sailor, the farmer and the fisherman, the lumberer and the pioneer who were building a world fo Americans to find a home in. Through the opening years of the 19th century Audubon haunted the frontiers that encircled the centres of culture and their men of thought.

The South in 1800 was a land of contrasts, of opulence and squalor, ignorance and learning, of exquisite gardens bordering on Amazonian swamps, fine mansions, beggarly taverns and roads that were rivers. One often met some great lady on a progress through the woods, drawn through the mud by four horses, seated in a splendid coach, made perhaps in London, and followed by a train by magnificently liveried servants.

Constantin Volney: Compared with France, we may say that the entire [United States] is one vast forest. I scarce travelled three miles together on open and cleared land.

Even from a distance it was easy to spot the Citangette, because it stood all by itself in the middle of a stretch of property littered with junk of all sorts: piles of bricks, rolls of roofing, scrapped cars, and even railway track.

There's nothing in this world can make me joy.
Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale,
Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man,
And bitter shame hath spoiled the sweet world's taste,
That it yields nought but shame and bitterness.

"I left Buenos Aires to get away as far as possible from my mother." It was true she had mislaid her beauty and become querulous over her lost estancia as she lived on into middle age in the great sprawling capital with its fantastica arquitectura of skyscrapers in mean streets rising haphazardly and covered for twenty floors with Pepsi-Cola advertisements.

We will fight hard, and the British will fight by our side, but, when a nation of seventy-five million goes to war with a nation of eight million, the outcome will not long be in question. And what we are suggesting tonight is that you prepare yourself for that eventuality.

No period in history has been more penetrated by and more dependent on the natural sciences than the twentieth century. Yet no period, since Galileo's recantation, has been less at ease with it.

The technological inferiority of China which became only too evident in the 19th century, because it was translated into military inferiority, was not due to technical or educational incapacity, but in the very sense of self-sufficiency and self-confidence of traditional Chinese civilization.

You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.

Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks...

Whatever the economic arguments, there were things in life that had to be protected. Would any government seriously consider tearing down Chartres Cathedral or the Taj Mahal if it could be shown that building a luxury hotel, shopping mall and conference center on the site ... would make a greater net addition to the country's GNP than could be yielded by the existing tourist traffic?

Conditions for military intervention in the Third World were far more inviting, especially in new, feeble and often tiny states where a few hundred armed men, reinforced or sometimes even replaced by foreigners, could carry decisive weight, and where inexperienced or incompetent governments were quite likely to produce recurrent states of chaos, corruption and confusion.

I see ... I see ... a train. Whistling and bellowing ... its red eye winking in the gloom ... I see ... a man goingon a long journey ... Light, light, light as a feather, he flies over the rails ... I see ... I see ... I can't se any more.

You must keep before your eyes our mortal lot, from which you can liberate yourself by this one memorial, for all else is frail anf fleeting. Death and non-existence descends on everything as on us men ourselves.

The clock of the Eglise Trinite had just struck eight o'clock in the morning when, without warning, an near-splitting explosion ripped through the district. A building on Rue de Clichy rocked on its foundations, and within seconds its staircase had collapsed from top to bottom and its windows had shattered.

The role of the Cold War is thus not to be underestimated, even if the long-term economic effect of the vast diversion of resources by states into competitive armaments was damaging. In the extreme case of the USSR it was probably fatal. However, even the USA traded off military strength against growing economic weakness.

It is now evident that the USSR was neither expansionist—still less aggressive—nor counting on any further extension of the communist advance beyond what is assumed had been agreed at the summits of 1943-45.

The best wine of the arts seemed to grow on the lava-streaked slopes of volcanos. It was not merely that the cultural authorities of politically revolutionary regimes gave more official recognition—i.e., material backing, to artistic revolutionaries than the conservative ones they replaced, even if their political authorities showed no enthusiasm.

The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system.

It is not necessary to go into the details of interwar history to see that the Versailles settlement could not possibly be the basis of a stable peace. It was doomed from the start, and another war was therefore practically certain.

She talks in cliches. She is a cliche. Forty or so, middle-sized, heavy around the hips, pale, not very good complexion, blondish -- half the white women in America look like that. Pressed out of a mold, made with a cookie cutter.

She had been thinking, and the thought came back like the turntable coming round, that it was hard, or anyway she found it hard, to realize that what you did was usually just done once. Once and for all. hat doing something wasn't just a kind of practice for something that would keep happening, but was what would happen, was what happened. You didn't get to practice.

he dissatisfaction of the masses is not based on economic deprivation but on a sense of [ineffectuality] . Not an increased standard of living, but more social power, is their fundamental goal, because of their emotional orientation, they can arise when a powerful father-figure can coordinate them into a functioning unit rather than a chaotic mass of unformed elements.

Science, in spite of its awe-inspiring magnitude, contains one flaw that partakes of the nature of the universe itself. It can solve problems, but it also creates them in a genuinely confusing ratio.

I must make clear that I do not belong to that weird group of people who travel to remote places, survive the bacteria, and then publish books to convince the incautious to follow in their footsteps. Traveling demands a disproportionate effort, especially when it's to places where there's no room service.

When Jack Waggoner, of Sacramento, first wrote to me about the great tire pile of California, he mentioned that all the scrap tires strewn about the American landscape would make a stack a hundred and forty-two thousand miles high. If you want to get rid of something like that, you don't try to do it by making lacrosse balls.

He had never seen such a moon—so white, so blinding and so large. "Like a great football just outside the glass," he thought, and then a memoment later, "No—it's bigger than that." By this time he was quite certain that something was seriously wrong with his eyes: no moon could possibly be the size of the thing he was seeing.

Brew Wheely [Bruce Willis] is the nun's tits, che, the best. Running around shooting and jumping out of buildings. Is that what it's like out there where you come from?