"Show me a man who enjoyed his schooldays and I'll show you a bully and a bore." Robert Morley
"Anyone who ever gave you confidence, you owe them a lot." Holly Golightly in Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's
"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act." Truman Capote
"It is a fairly consistent law of humanity that men spend about half their lives at war. A Frenchman, called Lapouge, calculated that from the year 1100 to the year 1500, England had been 207 years at war and 212 years from 1500 to 1900. In France the corresponding figures would be 192 and 181 years. According to that same man Lapouge, nineteen million men are killed in war every century. Their blood would fill three million barrels of 180 liters each, and would feed a fountain of blood running 700 liters an hour from the beginning of history."
Dr O'Grady in Andre Maurois' The Silence of Colonel Bramble
"Reading, like all work, has its rules. A perfect knowledge of a few writers and a few subjects is more valuable than a superficial one of a great many. The fine points of a piece of writing are seldom apparent at first reading. In youth, one should search among books as one searches the world for friends, and once these friends are found, chosen, and adopted, one must go into retirement with them. Intimacy with Montaigne, Saint Simon, Retz, Balzac, or Proust would be enough to enrich one's whole life." André Maurois"The Church did a great thing for love when she made a sin of it." Anatole France
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Wednesday, 2 October 2024
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Dr. O'Grady's numbers are off. Mankind may spend half its years at war, but no or few men do. Frederick the Great thought that one could keep at most 6% of the population under arms, and that war didn't pay if most of the population was aware of it. Between the end of the US Civil War and the Spanish-American War, just about a third of a century, the US was fairly steadily at war with the Plains and southwestern tribes. But those wars were fought on the US side by a small professional (not necessarily good) army, and they were fought far from the major US population centers. One could say roughly the same thing about the British Empire between the Mutiny and the Boer War.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, yes, the Roman Republic shut the doors of the Temple of Janus only three times in its history. But it put only so many men in the field at once, and in any case until the last couple of centuries the campaigning season was pretty short.
As for blood, WW I was the first war in which more died in battle or of wounds than from disease.
Sin: I have just been reading The Eudemian Ethics, and Aristotle takes a poor view of adultery. For that matter, Plato in The Laws is down on extramarital relations.
He was talking about fornication.
DeleteSo in part was Plato in Laws VIII 841-842. But perhaps Sterne was right, and they order these things better in France.
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