Schiff Quotes & Sayings

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same "wily and suspicious" marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. She did so in reverse and in her own name; this made her a deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. To these she added a few other offenses. She made Rome feel uncouth, insecure, and poor, sufficient cause for anxiety without adding sexuality into the mix. — Stacy Schiff

Winning the war on terrorism will also require a level of moral clarity that can provide a vision for struggling people and nations everywhere. — Adam Schiff

The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands. — Stacy Schiff

The prompt assimilation of that intelligence will be essential if we are to avoid another September 11th. — Adam Schiff

Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it has been argued, America its independence. — Stacy Schiff

Fifty-dollar oil is just another stop on the road to much higher crude prices. — Peter Schiff

I love my wife ... but sometimes not so much. Frustration and fights can muck up a good thing. And just when a thing can move past differences and into the realm of peace and prosperity, another thing - an old idea or new interpretation or any spark that relights the paradigms that comfort us - will keep us where we are, where it is safe. — Richard Schiff

Confidence by itself, unless it has a valid basis, can get us into trouble. — Peter Schiff

Americans are blessed with great plenty; we are a generous people and we have a moral obligation to assist those who are suffering from poverty, disease, war and famine. — Adam Schiff

We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion. — Stacy Schiff

Diadem, Cleopatra took part throughout the trip in religious — Stacy Schiff

By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature. — Stacy Schiff

Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers. — Stacy Schiff

I once interviewed David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln historian, and we talked about how one deals with the secondary sources and the previous biographies. He said something which kept coming back to me as I worked on Cleopatra, which was: 'There's no further new material; there are only new questions.' — Stacy Schiff

Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved. — Stacy Schiff

In an ideal world, the perfect biographical subject would have been the star of his penmanship class at grade school - and would thereafter write an English that positively sings. — Stacy Schiff

Women enjoyed rights in Egypt they would not again enjoy for more than 2,000 years. They owned ships, ran vineyards, filed lawsuits, practiced medicine. Their husbands supported them after divorce. Their power was unprecedented. — Stacy Schiff

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman. — Stacy Schiff

Everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy. — Stacy Schiff

It was rare to find a member of the family who did not liquidate a relative or two, Cleopatra VII included. — Stacy Schiff

The U. S. trade deficit with China shows that while we value the potential of their market, they value the reality of our market. It is in this area that we should use our leverage. — Adam Schiff

Until well into the evening, when the vermillion sun plunged precipitously into the harbor, Alexandria remained a swirl of reds and yellows, a swelling kaleidoscope of music, chaos, and color. — Stacy Schiff

I wouldn't dare to speculate as to Cleopatra's falling in love. Her relationships are too convenient for that. — Stacy Schiff

The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor. The word 'honey skinned' recurs in descriptions of her relatives and would presumably applied to hers as well, despite the inexactitudes surrounding her mother and paternal grandmother. There was certainly Persian blood in the family, but even an Egyptian mistress is a rarity among the Ptolemies. She was not dark skinned. — Stacy Schiff

I think Barack Obama has the overall right strategy and he's been right to resist bringing in massive numbers of American troops. The Iraqis would love to have Americans die for Iraq and the Syrians would love to have Americans die for Syria. — Adam Schiff

If someone is brought in for an interview, for example, and is asked about their views on things, but has posted things that are completely contrary to the interview, frankly I have much more faith in what they posted than what they say during the course of an interview. — Adam Schiff

Everyone has a captivity narrative; today we call it memoir. — Stacy Schiff

I checked to see if there'd been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, 'What can we know about her education?' It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before. — Stacy Schiff

Motherhood is always an act of courage. — Stacy Schiff

(The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra. It has been perhaps best defined as a Greek era in which the Greeks played no role.) — Stacy Schiff

No text more thoroughly penetrated Cleopatra's world. In an age infatuated with history and calibrated in glory, Homer's work was the Bible of the day. — Stacy Schiff

The way Steven Spielberg sees the world has become the way the world is communicated back to us every day. — Stephen Schiff

Printing money is merely taxation in another form. Rather than robbing citizens of their money, government robs their money of its purchasing power. — Peter Schiff

For a few thousand years, women had no history. Marriage was our calling, and meekness our virtue. Over the last century, in stuttering succession, we have gained a voice, a vote, a room, a playing field of our own. Decorously or defiantly, we now approach what surely qualifies as the final frontier. — Stacy Schiff

You ever try to leave New York? I did once. I lasted about a year. — Stacy Schiff

The left-wing agenda wants us to think that the reason there was a depression was because the government didn't do anything. That's not true. — Peter Schiff

Gold has intrinsic value. The problem with the dollar is it has no intrinsic value. And if the Federal Reserve is going to spend trillions of them to buy up all these bad mortgages and all other kinds of bad debt, the dollar is going to lose all of its value. Gold will store its value, and you'll always be able to buy more food with your gold. — Peter Schiff

Unless we have a Central Bank with adequate control of credit resources, this country is going to undergo the most severe and far reaching money panic in its history. — Jacob Schiff

There was good reason why Cleopatra's subjects viewed time as a coil of endless repetitions. — Stacy Schiff

The legacy of the Armenian Genocide is woven into the fabric of America. — Adam Schiff

Wall Street is in trouble because Main Street is broke. — Peter Schiff

Unquestionably, the world is better off without Saddam. — Adam Schiff

What we know about Cleopatra's looks is based purely on her coin portraits. Engraving was imperfect, and that when you are a ruler and you ask for a coin to be engraved with your likeness on it, you are probably trying to project a certain air of authority. — Stacy Schiff

Have you ever been married? Had that thing of someone calling you by a name not your own? It's unsettling. It's like a fictitious person. — Stacy Schiff

It can be argued that the U.S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management. — Peter Schiff

They should let my son be Federal Reserve chairman. At least he'll play with his toys and not ruin the economy. — Peter D. Schiff

Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered. — Stacy Schiff

How does a woman in authority convey that authority? Is it possible for a woman to rule without sounding shrill? Is it possible for a woman to manage without manipulating? All of these things seem to me to be very much at the fore today, and were no less the case 2,000 years ago. — Stacy Schiff

Gene Autry was a pioneering star in the early days of music, radio, film, television and rodeo performances. I am proud to posthumously honor such an inspiring role model — Adam Schiff

Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book. — Stacy Schiff

She knew neither that she was living in the first century BC nor in the Hellenistic Age, both of them later constructs. (The Hellenistic Age begins with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and ends in 30 BC, with the death of Cleopatra. — Stacy Schiff

[Cleopatra's] power has been made to derive from her sexuality, for obvious reason; as one of Caesar's murderers had noted, 'How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!' It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life. — Stacy Schiff

When somebody says, "The last thing I want to do is hurt you," it means they've got other things to do first. — Mark Schiff

It seems not to matter that we are at the brink of a war that may spread beyond Afghanistan and Iraq to Iran and Georgia and then where? To Syria? To North Korea? To China? That we in America are in economic doldrums and are seeing small businesses fold and houses reclaimed by banks and a smouldering panic that is palpable everywhere. — Richard Schiff

You're worth what you're worth — Peter Schiff

In fact, the converse is true: At a time when the United States has been called on for a level of moral leadership, vision and inspiration not seen since World War II, we cannot afford to dissemble about crimes against humanity. — Adam Schiff

Mutual funds are an overrated investment heavily promoted by Wall Street. — Peter Schiff

But from an early age she would have known literarily what she at twenty-one discovered empirically: there were days you felt like waging war, and days when you just needed to go home. — Stacy Schiff

At the very top state institutions, like UCLA, Berkeley and the University of Texas, however, the trend of downward minority enrollment remains persistent and discouraging. — Adam Schiff

To one visitor Alexandrian life was just one continuous revel, not a sweet or gentle revel either, but savage and harsh, a revel of dancers, whistlers, and murderers all combined. — Stacy Schiff

There are no checks and balances if the gov is wrong, if a private entrepreneur makes a mistake, he goes bankrupt, the losses are cut, if he bets wrong, he loses, if the gov bets wrong, they just get bigger, they just appropriate more money, it's a bottomless pit, because they either get it from the tax payers or run it off a printing press. — Peter Schiff

For all its erudition, Cleopatra's Egypt produced no fine historian. — Stacy Schiff

Reality does not easily give up meaning; it's the biographer's job to clobber it into submission. You're meant not only to tame it but to extract substance, to identify cause and axiomatic effect. You subsist on the tactical omissions, the hollow words, the oddly unconnected dots. — Stacy Schiff

We are an indebted family going out for an expensive meal to celebrate getting approved foe a new credit card. It might feel good (at the time), but we're still simply delaying the inevitable. — Peter Schiff

My mother always taught me that two wrongs don't make a right. We shouldn't bail out Wall Street. We shouldn't bail out Detroit. It will cost the economy more than the cost of the bailout which is more than the politicians think. We'll run into the hundred of millions to prop these companies up. — Peter Schiff

Faith aside, witchcraft served an eminently useful purpose. The aggravating, the confounding, the humiliating all dissolved in its cauldron. It made sense of the unfortunate and the eerie, the sick child and the rancid butter along with the killer cat. What else, shrugged one husband, could have caused the black and blue marks on his wife's arm? — Stacy Schiff

Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater. — Stacy Schiff

The Philadelphia Feds manufacturers report for September revealed that despite a sharp slowdown, its prices paid index surged 257 points. — Peter Schiff

A small business person has Uncle Sam as a partner, a partner who puts up no money, does no work, and wants 30 or 40 percent — Irwin Schiff

Printing money creates inflation, which weakens an economy. Unfortunately, this kind of common-sense thinking never seems to penetrate academic circles. — Peter Schiff

Minimum wage laws make it illegal for a worker to accept a job that pays less, even if the worker needs that job. — Peter Schiff

We should be worried about protecting the homeland. I think that policy is changing, should change and will change. — Adam Schiff

Evsei Slonim would have seen himself as a member of the intelligentsia, a classless class whose features Nabokov described as""the spirit of self-sacrifice, intense participation in political causes or political thought, intense sympathy for the underdog of any nationality, fanatical integrity, tragic inability to sink to compromise, true spirit of international responsibility. — Stacy Schiff

So let us call genocide, genocide. Let us not minimize the deliberate murder of 1.5 million people. Let us have a moral victory that can shine as a light to all nations. — Adam Schiff

For ten generations her family had styled themselves pharaohs. The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor. — Stacy Schiff

Plutarch gave her nine languages, including Hebrew and Troglodyte, an Ethiopian tongue that - if Herodotus can be believed - was unlike that of any other people; it sounds like the screeching of bats. — Stacy Schiff

Much has changed since the end of the Cold War that augurs well for the survival of our nation. — Adam Schiff

A capable, clear-eyed sovereign, she knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine. An eminent Roman general vouched for her grasp of military affairs. Even at a time when women rulers were no rarity she stood out, the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs. She was incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean. And she enjoyed greater prestige than any other woman of her age ... Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved. She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one. — Stacy Schiff

Although every step must be taken to protect against a chemical or biological attack in America, our nation would survive the use of those weapons as we did when anthrax was mailed to our Capitol and other targets. — Adam Schiff

And in this community, as in all others, the Golden Rule still applies - we must be act toward other nations as we would have them act towards America. — Adam Schiff

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere. — Stacy Schiff

Richard Schiff is a really good baseball player. It's surprising because he looks exhausted. — Bradley Whitford

The most reckless volume on the subject, the Malleus Maleficarum, or Witch Hammer, summoned a shelf of classical authorities to prove its point: "When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil." As is often the case with questions of women and power, elucidations here verged on the paranormal. Weak as she was to devilish temptations, a woman could emerge dangerously, insatiably commanding. According to the indispensable Malleus, even in the absence of occult power, women constituted "a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment." The — Stacy Schiff

I am one of the lucky ones; believe me, I haven't forgotten that. — Richard Schiff

A good-sized Ptolemaic vessel could carry three hundred tons of wheat down the river. At least two such ships made the trip daily - with wheat, barley, lentils - to feed Alexandria alone. — Stacy Schiff

Kildall, the innovator, followed his passion for technical excellence and was shocked that IBM wouldn't follow him. Gates, the imitator, took his cues from IBM every step of the way, because he believed that following Big Blue was the smartest way to follow the money. — Lewis Schiff

The primary factor that enables our government to peddle economic snake oil is the dollar's unique role as the world's reserve currency, and our creditors' willingness to preserve its status. By buying up dollars and loaning them back to us through Treasury debt, productive countries give American politicians cart blanche to play Santa Claus. — Peter Schiff

It's a huge gap in security, it's a huge problem we've had with our immigration system for many years. — Adam Schiff

published, Beverly minister John Hale had produced — Stacy Schiff

We're on a collision course for disaster. All we can do, all your viewers can do is brace for impactBuy gold. Buy silver Get as far away as you can from U.S. currency and the U.S. economy. — Peter Schiff

We will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything. - ANTON CHEKHOV — Stacy Schiff

All of the government's monetary, economic and political power, as well as its extensive propaganda machinery, will be enlisted in a constant battle to drive down the price of gold - but in the absence of any fundamental change in the nation's monetary, fiscal, and economic direction, simply regard any major retreat in the price of gold as an unexpected buying opportunity. — Irwin Schiff

For talk is evil: It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god." - HESIOD — Stacy Schiff

The president says we need to raise the debt ceiling because America pays its bills. No if we paid our bills we wouldn't have all this debt. The reason we have to raise the debt ceiling is because we can't pay our bills and we have to borrow money because we don't have any money to pay our bills. — Peter Schiff

Greed is normally balanced by fear. — Peter Schiff

Neither the University of Michigan nor its law school uses a quota system. — Adam Schiff

Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatraa much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all. — Evan Thomas

I am grateful to Stacy Schiff first of all because she can write a sentence-because she offers us her scholarship with wit, clarity, and grace. Once again, she has done what only the best writers can do: she has made the world new, again. — Tracy Kidder

I have three children, each of whom is having an idyllic childhood, probably because I have been at the office the entire time. — Stacy Schiff

If giving points to some students to achieve greater diversity is a quota system in violation of the Constitution, how can the awarding of points to the children of a less diverse alumni be upheld? — Adam Schiff