Escott Quotes & Sayings

In the newspapers the row about the prospect of genetically modified food raged on, and yet here were consumers effectively demanding lambs with four back legs. — Rose Prince

In general, those from outside the southern culture built a style around exaggerations of southern music, and missed the lonesome hillbilly and blues feel that was its core. In the quest for abandon, they also failed to understand that southern music is lazy music - at any tempo. — Colin Escott

Whom does undeserved honour please, and undeserved blame alarm, but the base and the liar? — Horace

All wars leave a legacy of bitterness and hatred, but internecine conflicts create the deepest scars. There is something different about such intrafamilial conflicts. People who once were part of one national family divide, define each other as the hateful enemy, and aim for the jugular. On both sides of an internecine conflict there is a feeling of betrayal, a sense that those who were brothers or sisters have been traitorous to their commitments or to the nation [1]. — Paul D. Escott

For almost one hundred years, leaders of the white South managed to freeze race relations and racial ideology in something close to the Confederate pattern, thus demonstrating that the passage of time by itself does not erase a conflicted past. Elite southern men and women created an ideology of the Lost Cause that wrapped antebellum society, the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and postwar racism in the mantle of a protective, laudatory myth. The Lost Cause portrayed the white South as cultured, chivalrous, and superior while making the North into the aggressor - crude, unprincipled, and vindictive.

[...] Even after 1900 the Lost Cause ideology continued to gain strength under the leadership of a new generation, until most southern whites came to believe that their history and the myth were identical [75 - 76]. — Paul D. Escott

If you're going to dream, why dream small? — Douglas Cardinal

What southern whites further sought, and in a sense demanded, was respect. This the North provided after 1876 in paeans to the courage and dedication of soldiers on both sides. Resentment of northern power, the war's destruction, and Reconstruction continued to be strong in the South, and the work of white-supremacist politicians, army veterans, and southern women turned that resentment into a long-lasting ideology of the Lost Cause. Northerners, for their part, congratulated themselves on winning the war and freeing the slaves; they also took pleasure in feeling superior to the South for many generations, while industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and other social changes diverted much of their attention from wartime issues [184]. — Paul D. Escott

The past is the occupational realm of historians - their daily work - and scholars have debated what their stance toward these social issues should be. As citizens and professionals, historians may naturally form a desire, as Carl Becker puts it, "to do work in the world." That is, they might aspire to write history that is not only of scholarly value but also has a salutary impact in society. Becker defines the appropriate impact and the historian's proper role as "correcting and rationalizing for common use Mr. Everyman's mythological adaption of what actually happened."

That process is never simple, however, when the subject involves divisions so deep that they led to civil wars. One issue that inevitably leads to controversy is the extent to which history involves moral judgment. Another is the power of myths, exerting their influence on society and acting in opposition to the findings of historical research [190 - 91]. — Paul D. Escott

War cannot eliminate differing ideas and viewpoints, and partisans of the defeated side do not disappear. Though subjugated, they become a sizable political constituency in the postwar period. A dictator may be able to repress them, and in democracies a numerical majority may outvote them, but neither can change their thoughts. Since civil wars are, by nature, deep and fundamental conflicts, the competition between the views that led to war is likely to resurface. The defeated side may be chastened or subdued, but its values and ways of seeing the world reappear, in some form, in politics [107]. — Paul D. Escott

Progress should not bow to fear, but should proceed with eyes wide open. — Max More

One South Carolinian who grew up early in the twentieth century "did not learn that the South had lost the war until he was twelve years old. 'It was one of the saddest awakenings I ever had,'" he recalled. Similarly, Margaret Mitchell remembered that she "heard so much about the fighting and hard times after the war that I firmly believed Mother and Father had been through it all instead of being born long afterward." [141 - 42] — Paul D. Escott

Why must it be so hard
For us to come to understand,
That there are things we cannot change
Hidden amongst the things we can?
For we can rearrange our hearts,
Dust out the corners of our minds,
We can teach our eyes to see
Only the things we wish to find.
Yet once we decorate our walls
And sweep our sorrows off the floor,
Why do we look to someone else,
To show us how we can be more?
For here is where the line
Between our can and can't gets tough,
Just the point at which we all must learn
That we are already enough,
That since we cannot choose the home,
Our only soul was born into,
We should rearrange its rooms
But learn to love its window's view. — Erin Hanson

Wonder Woman is not faking it. Wonder Woman means it. Wonder Woman is all swagger and badassery. Compliment — Shonda Rhimes

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing
articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence. — Shirley Hazzard

The impudence of Ignorance — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I really would like to know," he said with genuine curiosity. "The next time I kill someone, I'd like to do it in a way that doesn't freak you out." "How about you don't kill anybody for a little bit?" "I can't make that promise. — Ilona Andrews

The lovers of God have no religion but God alone. — Rumi

I have spiritual beliefs that I could literally go out and make an entire comedy routine about, and tour as some sort of spiritual guru, but it kind of goes against that [as] I actually believe the things, so I'm always kind of caught in the middle. — Jim Carrey

The man said that a portion of track just up into the mountain pass had been damaged by a rockslide early that morning, and they had shut down the whole system for maybe as long as the rest of the summer. The man shook his head, incredulous, disgusted, but also delighted in the way that people are often delighted by bad news, or the opportunity to discuss bad news that does not immediately affect them. — Amanda Coplin