151 Quotes by Stacy Schiff

As a teenager he had observed that success bred presumption and that presumption bred inattention. On the other hand misfortune fostered care and vigilance, by which losses might be reversed.

Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which.

No one sits on the stoop when she’s a kid and thinks, ‘I want to be a biographer when I grow up,’

We all apologize, or fail to, in our own ways.

It turns out to be eminently useful to have a disgrace in your past; Salem endures not only as a metaphor but as a vaccine and a taunt. It glares at us when fear paralyzes reason, when we overreact or overcorrect, when we hunt down or deliver up the alien or seditious.

Plutarch gave her nine languages, including Hebrew and Troglodyte, an Ethiopian tongue that – if Herodotus can be believed – was “unlike that of any other people; it sounds like the screeching of bats.

What was said of an earlier tribune was more true of Antony: “He was a spendthrift of money and chastity – his own and other people’s.” The brilliant cavalry officer had all of Caesar’s charm and none of his self-control. In 44 the conspirators had deemed him too inconsistent to be dangerous. After the Ides Mark Antony was in his glory, entirely the man of the hour – at least until Octavian arrived. Cleopatra.

Our appetite for the miraculous endures; we continue to want there to be something beyond our ken. We hope to locate the secret powers we didn’t know we had, like the ruby slippers Dorothy finds on her feet and that Glinda has to tell her how to work. Where women are concerned, it is preferable that those powers manifest only when crisis strikes; the best heroine is the accidental one.

The Ptolemaic system has been compared to that of Soviet Russia; it stands among the most closely controlled economies in history.