34 Quotes by Hampton Sides

A stagnant navy,” noted one maritime scholar, “was no place for a man on the make.

As he saw it, the central issue had shifted from the purely racial to the economic. King likened the situation to a lifelong prisoner who is released from jail after the warden discovers that the man was falsely accused all along. “Go ahead, you’re free now,” the jailer says. But the prisoner has no job skills, no prospects, and the jailer doesn’t think to give him money for the bus fare into town.

Muir now could see that this icy wilderness was as vulnerable as it was vast – marked by fragile rhythms of migration, interdependencies of population, and patterns of habit many thousands of years in the making.

Yet Wallace and other segregationists created an inflamed environment in which a confused but also ambitious man like Ray could think it was permissible, perhaps even noble, to murder King. The signals Ray was picking up enabled him to believe that society would smile on his crime. What.

As the Jeannette drew nearer to the equator, the waters became oily calm and teemed with eels, tortoises, and dolphins.

But their greater slaughter was unwitting: As the forerunners of Western civilization, creeping up the river valleys and across the mountain passes, the trappers brought smallpox and typhoid, they brought guns and whiskey and venereal disease, they brought the puzzlement of money and the gleam of steel. And on their liquored breath they whispered the coming of an unimaginable force, of a gathering shadow on the eastern horizon, gorging itself on the continent as it pressed steadily this way.

I thought we’d been forgotten,” the prisoner said. “No, you’re not forgotten,” Robbins said. “We’ve come for you.