Sedulia's Quotations

Thomas De Quincey: At thirteen, I wrote Greek with ease

My father died, when I was about seven years old, and left me to the care of four guardians. I was sent to various schools, great and small; and was very early distinguished for my classical attainments, especially for my knowledge of Greek. At thirteen, I wrote Greek with ease; and at fifteen my command of that language was so great, that I not only composed Greek verses in lyric metres, but could converse in Greek fluently, and without embarrassment-- an accomplishment which I have not since met with in any scholar of my times, and which, in my case, was owing to the practice of daily reading off the newspapers into the best Greek I could furnish extempore: for the necessity of ransacking my memory and invention, for all sorts and combinations of periphrastic expressions, as equivalents for modern ideas, images, relations of thing, &c. gave me a compass of diction which would never have been called out by a dull translation of moral essays, &c. "That boy," said one of my masters*, pointing the attention of a stranger to me, "that boy could harangue an Athenian mob, better than you or I could address an English one." He who honoured me with this eulogy, was a scholar, "and a ripe and good one": and of all my tutors, was the only one whom I loved or reverenced. Unfortunately for me (and, as I afterwards learned, to this worthy man's great indignation), I was transferred to the care, first of a blockhead**, who was in a perpetual panic, lest I should expose his ignorance; and finally, to that of a respectable scholar, at the head of a great school on an ancient foundation. This man had been appointed to his situation by ___ College, Oxford; and was a sound, well-built scholar, but (like most men, whom I have known from that college) coarse, clumsy, and inelegant. A miserable contrast he presented, in my eyes, to the Etonian brilliancy of my favourite master: and besides, he could not disguise from my hourly notice, the poverty and meagreness of his understanding. It is a bad thing for a boy to be, and to know himself, far beyond his tutors, whether in knowledge or in power of mind. This was the  case, so far as regarded knowledge at least, not with myself only: for the two boys, who jointly with myself composed the first form, were better Grecians than the headmaster, though not more elegant scholars, nor at all more accustomed to sacrifice to the graces. When I first entered, I remember that we read Sophocles; and it was a constant matter of triumph to us, the learned triumvirate of the first forms, to see our "Archididasculus" (as he loved to be called) conning our lesson before we went up, and laying a regular train, with lexicon and grammar, for blowing up and blasting (as it were) any difficulties he found in the choruses; whilst we never condescended to open our books, until the moment of going up, and were generally employed in writing epigrams upon his wig, or some such important matter.

    --Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) on his early life in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821)

* John Morgan, headmaster of Bath Grammar School
** The Reverend Edward Spencer, Rector of Winkfield in Wiltshire and headmaster of a private school there
***Charles Lawson, headmaster of Manchester Grammar School, whose appointment was in the gift of Brasenose College, Oxford
****Archididasculus = Headmaster

Will.i.am: If countries were people, Italy would be dead

If countries were people, England and France would be old men. Italy would be dead.

     --Will.i.am (William J. Adams) (1975- ) in an interview with Dana White, Oprah magazine, May 2009

Carl Hiaasen: The Seminoles never surrendered

From 1835 to 1842, the United States government for the second time directed its military might against a small band of Indians settled in the wilderness of Florida. During those years the Seminoles were pursued by almost every regiment of the regular army, and more than fifty thousand volunteers and militiamen. By the time it was over, the Second Seminole War had cost the United States an estimated thirty million dollars, a mountainous sum in that era, and more than three thousand lives.

The toll was all the more astounding because, at the peak of its strength, the Seminole tribe had no more than a thousand warriors.

Absurdly outnumbered, braves would lure the white infantry deep into the boggy swamps and pine barrens, then attack in lightning flurries. The strategy proved effective at first, but in the end the Indians were overrun. Their home camps were razed, hundreds of families were wiped out and nearly four thousand tribal members were deported to Indian Country, the bleak plains of Oklahoma. Nevertheless, the small number of Seminoles who remained in Florida refused to surrender, and to this day their descendants have never signed a peace treaty with Washington, D.C.

    --Carl Hiaasen (1953- ) in Nature Girl

Science reporting in danger

 

Newspaper science reporters are more endangered than black rhinos or giant pandas. The Los Angeles Times and Newsday and have dismantled their once-sizable staffs of expert science journalists. In February the Boston Globe closed its science and health section. Recently CNN disbanded its science unit, dismissing one of America's preeminent TV science journalists, Miles O'Brien. One newsmagazine, having cut some of its best science writers, now runs stories on its website provided by the government, disguised as news. At a science journalism awards ceremony, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting last month in Chicago, the winners in the newspaper category both noted that they no longer had jobs.

--Tom Siegfried, Editor-in-Chief, Science News, March 28, 2009