151 Quotes by Stacy Schiff

And if you take away my life,” she threatened, “God will give you blood to drink.

I’m a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change.

Evsei Slonim would have seen himself as a member of the intelligentsia, a classless class whose features Nabokov described as”“the spirit of self-sacrifice, intense participation in political causes or political thought, intense sympathy for the underdog of any nationality, fanatical integrity, tragic inability to sink to compromise, true spirit of international responsibility.

I checked to see if there’d been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, ‘What can we know about her education?’ It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.

There was nothing to be gained by making a man feel unkind for having to refuse a favor, or weak in revealing his inability to do so.

He had come a long way since his conviction, as a twenty-year-old, that honesty could not be counterfeited.

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 regularity in Alexandria.

America’s tiny reign of terror, Salem represents one of the rare moments in our enlightened past when the candles are knocked out and everyone seems to be groping about in the dark, the place where all good stories begin.

What good were these experiments?” went the skeptic’s question. To which Franklin replied, “What good is a new-born babe?” In some versions he continued: “He may be an imbecile, or a man of great intelligence. Let us wait for him to complete his studies before judging him.