1492 Quotes

“to become a great saint, it is no bad first step to be a big sinner.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“Capitalism seems to have failed and is now stigmatized as greed. A reaction against individual excess is driving the world back to collective values. Fear of terror overrides rights; fear of slumps subverts free markets. Consumption levels and urbanization are simply unsustainable at recent rates in the face of environmental change. The throwaway society is headed for the trash heap. People who sense that “modernity” is ending proclaim a “postmodern age.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“Only three routes of upward mobility were available to socially ambitious upstarts such as Columbus: war, the Church, and the sea. Columbus probably contemplated all three: he wanted a clerical career for one of his brothers, and fancied himself as “a captain of cavaliers and conquests.” But seafaring was a natural choice, especially for a boy from a maritime community as single-minded as that of Genoa. Opportunities for employment and profit abounded.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“To understand what was in Ivan’s mind, one has to think back to what the world was like before Machiavelli. The modern calculus of profit and loss probably meant nothing to Ivan. He never thought about realpolitik. His concerns were with tradition and posterity, history and fame, apocalypse and eternity.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“Disdain for blacks as inherently inferior to other people and the pretense that reason and humanity are proportional to the pink pigment in Western flesh were new prejudices. Disgust with Mali fed them. Attitudes remained equivocal, but the balance of white assumptions tilted against blacks. If white respect for black societies had survived the encounter with Mali, how different might the subsequent history of the world have been?”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth Collided

“Like poor immigrants throughout the ages, Jews there adjusted to the jobs no one else would do.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“An age of expansion really did begin, but the phenomenon was of an expanding world, not, as some historians say, of European expansion. The world did not simply wait passively for European outreach to transform it as if touched by a magic wand. Other societies were already working magic of their own, turning states into empires and cultures into civilizations. Some of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding societies of the fifteenth century were in the Americas, southwest and northern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“My lineage is for me enough, / Content to live without expensive stuff” was Alonso Manrique’s motto, but he was an accomplished poet.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth Collided

“History has no course. It thrashes and staggers, swivels and twists, but never heads one way for long. Humans who get caught up in it try to give it destinations. But we all pull in different directions, heading for different targets, and tend to cancel each other's influence out. When trends last for a short spell, we sometimes ascribe them to "men of destiny" or "history makers", or to great movements -- collectively heroic or myopic - or to immense, impersonal forces or laws of social development or economic change: class struggle, for instance, or "progress" or "development" or some other form of History with a capital H. But usually some undetectably random event is responsible for initiating big change. History is a system reminiscent of the weather: the flap of a butterfly's wings can stir up a storm.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the World Began

“His addiction to millenarianism, his confidence in visions, his prophetic stridency, his hatred of art, and his mistrust of secular scholarship align him with aspects of the modern world most moderns reject: religious obscurantism, extreme fanaticism, irrational fundamentalism.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 1492: The Year the Four Corners of the Earth Collided