Sedulia's Quotations

Robert Byron on Iraq, 1933

It is little solace to recall that Mesopotamia was once so rich, so fertile of art and invention, so hospitable to the Sumerians, the Seleucids, and the Sasanids. The prime fact of Mesopotamian history is that in the thirteenth century Hulagu destroyed the irrigation system; and that from that day to this Mesopotamia has remained a land of mud deprived of mud's only possible advantage, vegetable fertility. It is a mud plain, so flat that a single heron, reposing on one leg beside some rare trickle of water in a ditch, looks as tall as a wireless aerial. From this plain rise villages of mud and cities of mud. The rivers flow with liquid mud. The air is composed of mud refined into a gas. The people are mud-coloured; they wear mud-coloured clothes, and their national hat is nothing more than a formalized mud-pie. Baghdad is the capital one would expect of this divinely favoured land. It lurks in a mud fog; when the temperature drops below 110 [ºF], the residents complain of the chill and get out their furs. For only one thing is it now justly famous: a kind of boil which takes nine months to heal, and leaves a scar.

  --Robert Byron (1905-1941), The Road to Oxiana (pub. 1937)

Lockerbie: Diplomat's wife hears a different story

Pan Am flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, killing 270 people, including 11 on the ground

A curious thing happened in the Gambia which I have often thought about since. Very soon after the Lockerbie disaster, an ex-Interpol detective came to dinner with us. He was in the Gambia investigating some kind of fisheries fraud for the EU. Over the meal we discussed Lockerbie and he said, "Oh it will all come out soon. That plane was carrying drugs to the US as part of a deal over the American hostages in Lebanon." He went on to tell us that in order for the drugs to get through unimpeded it was arranged that the cargo if the Pan Am plane would not be inspected. What happened then, he said, was that, via the Lebanese/Hezbollah/Iran connection, the extraordinary fact that the plane's cargo would travel unchecked, came to the ears of Iranians seeking revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner by the US not long before; somehow they arranged to put a bomb on board.

Though the detective said that this story would be all over the papers in the following months, it never was. I have told it to every journalist I know, but no paper has ever taken it up-- although there was a book published years ago called The Octopus Trail, which told more or less the same tale. Last year, not long before he died, I happened to tell Paul Foot the story and he urged me not to let it lie-- which is why I am putting it into this book.

       --Brigid Keenan (1939- ), Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse (2005)

Persian king as literary critic

...the Persian monarch who, having to adjudicate upon two poems, caused the one to be read to him, and at once, without ado, awarded the prize to the other....

    --Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944), On the Art of Writing, Inaugural chapter (1913)

If you know the source of the story, could you please let me know?

Edward Gibbons on the conquest of the land of Canaan by the Jews

The conquest of the land of Canaan was accompanied with so many wonderful and with so many bloody circumstances, that the victorious Jews were left in a state of irreconcilable hostility with all their neighbors.

--Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (pub. 1766-88)

Yale President Levin: European universities have "fallen by the wayside"

 

There are a lot of countries investing in making universities stronger, especially in Asia...And now Saudi Arabia, with its very huge investment to build a university of science and technology. There will be more competition for American universities. Europe, I think, has fallen by the wayside.

   --President Richard Levin (1947- ) of Yale University in an interview with Matthew Kaminski, in the Wall Street Journal online "Opinion: The Weekend Interview," 6 June 2009

Ils ne pensent qu'à ça!*

Little Mermaid wears hijab

The country where "sex" is searched for most often on Google is Pakistan. Also in the top ten: Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.

*That's all they think about.

Richard Clarke: Invading Iraq after 9/11 was like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor.

Invading Iraq after 9/11 was like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor.

       --Richard Clarke (1941-), intelligence and counter-terrorism advisor to four administrations, three Republican and one Democratic

Max Rodenbeck reviews Michael Oren's book Power, Faith, and Fantasy: the Statue of Liberty was intended to adorn the Suez Canal

Who remembers now...that the Statue of Liberty was initially conceived by her French sculptor as an Eqyptian peasant girl, intended to adorn the entrance to the Suez Canal? Or that the first Zionists to settle in Palestine were in fact American Protestants, who planted successive, ill-fated colonies aimed at "restoring" the Holy Land to Jews, so that their subsequent conversion to Christianity would speed the Second Coming?

    --Max Rodenbeck reviewing Michael Oren's book Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present in the International Herald Tribune, 27-28 January 2007

President George W. Bush warns against government over-spending

"You'll get used to it in time," said the Caterpillar; and it put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.

For months, I've warned the Democrats in Congress that I will not accept an irresponsible tax-and-spend budget.

  --President George W. Bush in a radio speech last Saturday.

Cost of war in Iraq: more than $200,000,000 a day; including health care for wounded soldiers, more than two trillion dollars ($2,000,000,000,000) total.

Update, 2 December 2008. President George W. Bush in interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News: I was unprepared for war....the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq....you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

Mr. Gibson: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?

Mr. Bush: Yes, because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to let the inspectors go in to determine whether or not the U.N. resolutions were being upheld. In other words, if he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.

Mr. Gibson: No, if you had known he didn’t.

Mr. Bush: Oh, I see what you’re saying. You know, that’s an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can’t do.

Ray Bradbury's solution to the Middle East impasse

His solution to the Middle East impasse sounds like science fiction: create a new Jewish homeland in south Florida. "People think I'm joking when I say that," Mr Bradbury said.

           --Ray Bradbury,  quoted in an article on Fahrenheit 451 by Rob Kendt, The New York Times, 19 March 2006