Sometimes an Art Quotes

“Every major feature of the modern United States—from racial equality to Social Security, from the Pentagon to the suburb—represents a repudiation of Jeffersonianism.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“once one claims that one knows what others need better than they know it themselves, one is “in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf of their ‘real’ selves … albeit often submerged and inarticulate.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“That is to say, their thoughts came higglety-pigglety out of the big, buzzing, booming confusion of their minds, too many pouring out chaotically in the same instant.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“So the Chapter of Perfection, under the leadership of Johannes Kelpius, both a Rosicrucian magus and a magister of the University of Altdorf, set out for Pennsylvania to prepare for the coming of the Lord and to seek that state of personal perfection that was free of all sensuous temptations and beyond all rational understanding. Quickly upon their arrival they built a log-walled monastery of perfect proportions: forty feet by forty feet. It had a common room for communal worship and also cells where the celibate brethren could search for personal perfection by contemplating their magic numbers and their esoteric symbols. In a primitive laboratory they conducted alchemical and pharmaceutical experiments aimed at eliminating disease and prolonging life indefinitely. And on the roof they placed a telescope, which they manned from dusk till dawn, so that in case the Bridegroom came in the middle of the night they would be prepared to receive him.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“Independence was enriching, but most often it meant loss, isolation, and cultural deprivation,”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“All sorts of efforts were made to populate the Floridas—with anyone: Huguenots, Bermudians, Irish, Germans, Swiss, Scottish Highlanders, even some of the prostitutes being rehabilitated in London’s Magdalen House. Sir Alexander Grant, who dreamed up the idea of transporting the prostitutes to Florida, confessed, with not exactly stunning insight, “Tis true they are not virgins”; nevertheless, he said, they would surely make splendid wives and mothers for such as were likely to live in a place like Florida.5”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“Rhode Island, a colony that the mainstream Puritans denounced as “a cesspool of vile heresies and irreligion,”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“many of these excellent young people could not, as a general rule, either read or write, as these activities are understood in our best universities.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“Even toward the middle of the century, there were occasions when the London mailbag for Edinburgh was found to contain only a single letter.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“we don’t live in Plato’s Commonwealth, and when we can’t have perfection we ought to comply with the measure that is least remote from it.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.… The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body will be argued into slavery.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body will be argued into slavery.6”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“why did he not free his slaves?”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“he sincerely loathed slavery; he called it “an abominable crime” and a blot on civilization.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“Jefferson was a liberal, imaginative, and sensitive man,”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“historians should be doing, according to some, is condemning them and focusing on the immorality of slavery and the Founders’ moral blinders.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“Fliess concluded from his studies that the physiological seat of sexuality lay in the nose, and that there was a twenty-three-day cycle in male sexuality that bore some relation to astronomical movements.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“we try to describe the path from then to now, and in doing so select for our accounts the elements in a once indeterminate situation that appear to have led to the future outcome.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“The number of slave voyages included in the database has now risen to thirty-five thousand, accounting for the forced migration of more than twelve million Africans between 1514 and 1866, a million more than were estimated at the time of the conference in 1998.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“10 percent of the slaves on such voyages were killed in the insurrections (which totals one hundred thousand deaths, 1500–1867),”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“slave rebellions occurred on approximately 10 percent of all slave ships,”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“at the height of the British slave trade, in the 1790s, one large slave vessel left England for Africa every other day.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History

“it is a fact that eleven million Africans were forcibly carried abroad, more than nine million of them to the Americas.”
― Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History