If something foreign arrives at Paris, they either think they invented it, or that it has always been there. —Horace Walpole
He is drunk at least 22 hours of every 24 and never without one or two whores in company.)
For talk is evil: It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god. —HES...
Believe me there’s no spiteful stupidity, no horror, no absurd story that one can’t get the idle-minded folk of a great city to swallow if one goes the right way about it—
We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are. We
To one visitor Alexandrian life was just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined.
Things disturb us in the night. Sometimes they are our consciences. Sometimes they are our secrets. Sometimes they are our fears, translated from one idiom to another. Often what pinches and pricks, g...
The best that can be said of the Alexandrian War is that Caesar acquitted himself brilliantly in a situation in which he stupidly found himself.
Learning was a serious business, involving endless drills, infinite rules, long hours. There was no such thing as a weekend; one studied on all save for festival days, which came with merciful regular...
It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of an...
In the only letter he wrote that Christmas, Franklin conceded that he no longer coveted the Brillon house as once he had. His feelings for his neighbor’s wife remained constant, however. If in her tra...
In Europe pedigree might be all, but it is a commodity that cannot be carried to a worse market than to that of America, where people do not enquire concerning a stranger, what is he? but what can he...
Diadem, Cleopatra took part throughout the trip in religious
Who can adequately express his astonishment at the changes of fortune, and the mysterious vicissitudes in human affairs?
We most often understand the value of time only when we are in a position of having to regret its loss,
We have believed in any number of things - the tooth fairy, cold fusion, and benefits of smoking, the free lunch - that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't k...
The Franklin known to the French, the Franklin who had briefly visited Paris in 1767 and 1769 was—in Voltaire’s description—the discoverer of electricity, a man of genius, a first name in science, a s...
John Jay would offer the best analysis later, to George Washington: There is as much intrigue in this state house as in the Vatican, but as little secrecy as in a boarding school.
In John Adams’s worst nightmare, the story of the American Revolution assumed a different formulation: The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprun...
He was the world-renowned tamer of lightning, the man who had disarmed the heavens, who had vanquished superstition with reason.