Mark Adams Quotes & Sayings

That the story of Atlantis - much beloved by psychics, UFO spotters, and conspiracy theorists - should have sprung from one of history's greatest minds struck me, to put it lightly, as a little odd. It was like hearing that — Mark Adams

I'd found fear of death and failure to be excellent motivators. — Mark Adams

I remembered an unpleasant weekend spent struggling to comprehend the philosopher Immanuel Kant's explanation of the difference between calling something beautiful and calling it sublime. Nowadays, we throw around the word "sublime" to describe gooey desserts or overpriced handbags. In Kant's epistemology, it meant something limitless, an aesthetically pleasing entity so huge that it made the perceiver's head hurt. Machu Picchu isn't just beautiful, it's sublime. — Mark Adams

The ability to arrive uninvited in an alien land and convince one's hosts that almost everything they believe is wrong requires a rather forceful personality. — Mark Adams

Wittgenstein had helped fake the moon landings. — Mark Adams

So the Inca Trail isn't just a pretty shortcut that Pachacutec took on his way to his summer home?" "Mark, you can't finish the Inca Trail and not know that this was the end point of a pilgrimage. — Mark Adams

On a globe it looks like a swollen California. Within that space, though, are twenty-thousand-foot peaks, the world's deepest canyon (twice as deep as the Grand Canyon), unmapped Amazon jungle and the driest desert on earth. — Mark Adams

If you've ever thought, 'The new Times Square is delightful but would be even better if it were more claustrophobic and nearly impossible to leave', the Aguas Calientes is calling your name — Mark Adams

Separating fact and fiction in Inca history is impossible, because virtually all the sources available are Spanish accounts of stories that had already been vetted by the Inca emperors to highlight their own heroic roles. Imagine a history of modern Iraq written by Dick Cheney and based on authorized biographies of Sadam Hussein published in Arabic, and you'll get some idea of what historians face. — Mark Adams

I felt bad for lying to John, who was about as honest as Abe Lincoln on sodium Pentothal. — Mark Adams