Sedulia's Quotations

Raymond Chandler: Looking daggers

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.

   --In The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)

Tony Judt: Europeans understand war better than Americans

   

Compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.

...In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million....

But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead....France lost 270,000 civilians....Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 milllion, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million....In China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown now....The complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand-- in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies-- seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well.
 

       --British historian Tony Judt (1948- )in the New York Review of Books, 1 May 2008

Tolstoy: "Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women."

"Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women."

     --Prince Vassily to Anna Pavlovna, in ch. 3 of War and Peace (published 1865) by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), 2007 translation by Richard Pevear (1943- ) and Larissa Volokhonsky

The Chinese word for poetry means "language of the heart"

The Chinese word for poetry is shih (詩) and is composed of two parts. The part on the left (言) means "language," and the part on the right (寺) originally mean "administrative court" and later came to mean "Buddhist temple." But this was not the original form of the part on the right, and neither "court" nor "temple" has anything to do with the meaning of shih. This is because the second part was originally written chih (志), meaning "from the heart," and the later form was simply the result of calligraphic shorthand and subsequent invention. Hence, the word for poetry does not mean "the language of the court/ temple" but "the language of the heart." The Great Preface to the Book of Odes says, "When it's in the heart, it's chih. When it's expressed in language, it's shih."

    --Translator's preface to Poems of the Masters: China's Classic Anthology of T'ang and Sung Dynasty Verse (2003), translated by Red Pine [pseudonym of Bill Porter] (1943- )

Anderson Cooper on the real privilege

I grew up in a privileged environment, but to me the greatest privilege was at a very early age realizing that what a lot of people think they want, what a lot of people are aiming for-- ultimately, they will be just as miserable as everybody else. Once you realize that, it's sort of freeing.

     --Anderson Cooper (1967- )in Outside magazine, May 2008, interviewed by Patrick Symmes