28 Quotes by Susan Wise Bauer

The idea that fast reading is good reading is a twentieth-century weed, springing out of the stony farmland cultivated by the computer manufacturers.

The only men ruthless enough to fight against tyranny were themselves inclined to it.

[The Great Fire of London] hesitated, and it finally began to flicker out. But four-fifths of London had been burned...Londoner John Evelyn, weeping, wrote in his diary, "London was, but is no more.

[Albert of Wallenstein] loved war. He was very tall and skeletally thin, usually dressed in sinister black, with a single streak of red. "[He is] unmerciful," wrote the astronomer Johannes Kepler, describing Wallenstein, "devoted only to himself and his desires...covetous, deceitful...usually silent, often violent.

This King of the World didn't reign alone. His wife, Mumtaz Mahal...traveled with him everywhere, helped him govern his kingdom, and worked with him to plan out his military campaigns. She kept his seal...and every decree that he made went to her to be approved.

When it was time for the king and queen to leave the palace, Henrietta refused to come out of her room. She declared that she couldn't attend a Protestant ceremony. When Charles's noblemen tried to force her through the door, Henrietta punched her fists through the glass windows of her room!

[Peter the Great] also wanted women to take off their veils and mingle with men at social gatherings. He even wanted them to have tutors and be educated like men.

Like Peter the Great, Catherine liked many of the ideas of the West... She bought many western customs to Russia. She rewrote Russia's confusing, ancient laws so that her people would have more rights... She opened new schools and started the first college for Russian women. She even made a woman the director of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The days of kings and lords first began to lose their brightness when philosophers and scientists realized that the ancient Greeks, who had long been held up as the wisest men in the world, were sometimes wrong.