The Last Days of the Incas Quotes

“In a sense, New World conquest was about men seeking a way around one of life's basic rules - that human beings have to work for a living, just like the rest of the animal world. In Peru, as elsewhere in the Americas, Spaniards were not looking for fertile land that they could farm, they were looking for the cessation of their own need to perform manual labor. To do so, they needed to find large enough groups of people they could force to carry out all the laborious tasks necessary to provide them with the essentials of life: food, shelter, clothing, and, ideally, liquid wealth. Conquest, then, had little to do with adventure, but rather had everything to do with groups of men willing to do just about anything in order to avoid working for a living. Stripped down to its barest bones, the conquest of Peru was all about finding a comfortable retirement.”
― Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas

“You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” THUCYDIDES, THE HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR, 5TH CENTURY B.C.”
― Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas

“The Incas, although an authoritarian monarchy, had succeeded nevertheless during their short reign not only in creating a massive empire, but perhaps more importantly in guaranteeing all of the empire's millions of inhabitants the basic necessities of life: adequate food, water, and shelter. It was an achievement that no subsequent government -- Spanish or Peruvian -- has attained since”
― Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas

“The wars that are to be feared the most and are the cruelest are the civil wars. Rome was never threatened as much by its [foreign] enemies such as Pyrrhus and Hannibal as it was by its own citizens.”
― Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas

“The Incas’ genius— like that of the Romans—lay in their masterful organizational abilities. Amazingly, an ethnic group that probably never exceeded 100,000 individuals was able to regulate the activities of roughly ten million people. This was in spite of the fact that the empire’s citizens spoke more than seven hundred local languages and were distributed among 2,500 miles of some of the most rugged and diverse terrain on earth.”
― Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas

“Tell me, Rui Díaz, if I were to give the King a very great treasure, would he withdraw all the Christians from this land?” Rui Díaz replied, “How much would you give?” Rui Díaz said that Manco then had a [large quantity] . . . of corn [kernels] brought out and had it piled on the ground. And from that pile he took one grain, and said: “The Christians have [only] found as much gold and silver as this kernel; by comparison what you have not found is as large as this pile from which I took this single kernel.” . . . Rui Díaz [then] said to Manco Inca, “Even if all these mountains were made of gold and silver and you were to give them to the King, he would [still] not withdraw the Spaniards from this land.”
― Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas

“Beginning in about 3200 b.c.—roughly during the same period when the Egyptians were building their first pyramids—people on Peru’s northern coast began building terraced mounds alongside large plazas, ceremonial architecture, and large-scale settlements.”
― Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas

“In Spanish culture in the sixteenth century, the ages between thirty and forty-five were considered the prime years for men, that is, those were the years in which a man was considered to be both mature and to have the most energy.”
― Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas

“Pizarro y sus hombres habían logrado un nuevo hito de violencia en el Nuevo Mundo con la matanza de cerca de siete mil indígenas en apenas unas horas. Ahora”
― Kim MacQuarrie, Los últimos días de los incas