“The illustrious Joan of Arc proved that it was no miracle that French genius could prevail in circumstances when national independence was threatened. United, the French nation has never been defeated; but our neighbours – more calculating, more adroit – abusing the openness and loyalty of our character, constantly sowed dissentions in our midst, from which stemmed all the misfortunes of those times, and all the disasters in our history.”

—Napoleon in a letter to the mayor of Orléans, who asked for his support in erecting a statue of Joan of Arc. Napoleon ended up paying for the statue from his own pocket.

"History is who we are and why we are the way we are.”

David McCullough, American historian (1933-2022)

As far as we know, the first testimony of a change in climate in America comes from Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, military governor in Santo Domingo and royal chronicler of the Indies. When he was writing, in 1548, the improvement of the American climate was no longer a mere hope, as in Columbus, but an attested, widely shared view [...] The basis of climate improvement, according to Oviedo, was political: desiccation and cooling were due to ‘Spanish sovereignty, which tames (doma) and mellows (aplaca) these regions and their rigours, just as it tames the Indians and animals inhabiting them.’ Climate change reflected, hallowed, and sanctified the transition from one sovereignty to another. If, in the initial stages of the conquest, Hispaniola was hot and humid, this was because it had been possessed ‘for so long by savage peoples’; because ‘neither trodden nor ploughed . . . the forests grew incessantly’; and because ‘its very few paths were like rabbit tracks.’ The non-domination of nature, and a relationship to the land akin to that of animals, invalidated Indian claims to sovereignty. Oviedo envisaged his natural history as a providentialist treatise on behalf of the global reign of Charles V. Climate improvement attested to a divine plan for Spanish sovereignty over the New World.

— Jean-Baptiste Fressoz & Fabien Locher (translated by Gregory Elliott), Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change.

Follow Diary of a Philosopher for more quotes!

All the illnesses that a man has in his life come to a halt; only bibliomania can't be cured.

-Lu You (Chinese poet and author)

"We all have our seats in history."

Source, random line during a brainstorming session.

Brutus is just as cute as Caesar, right? Brutus is just as smart as Caesar, people totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar, and when did it become okay for one person to be the boss of everybody because that's not what Rome is about!

History repeats itself because no one was listening the first time.

One day you think: I want to die. And then you think, very quietly, actually I want a coffee. I want a nap. A sandwich. A book. And I want to die turns day by day into I want to go home, I want to walk in the woods, I want to see my friends, I want to sit in the sun. I want a cleaner room, I want a better job, I want to live somewhere else, I want to live.

"It hurt to lose to Ronald Reagan. But after the election, I tried to make the transition as smooth as possible. Later, from my experience in trying to brief him on matters of supreme importance, I was very disturbed at his lack of interest. The issues were the 15 or 20 most important subjects that I as President could possibly pass on to him. His only reaction of substance was to express admiration for the political circumstances in South Korea that let President Park close all the colleges and draft all the demonstrators. That was the only issue on which he came alive."

-- Former President Jimmy Carter, on losing the 1980 election and the transition leading to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, interview with TIME Magazine, October 11, 1982.

Napoleon about the imperial nobility, to Barry O'Meara in October 1816:

I created the imperial nobility to crush the old one and to satisfy the people from which had come most of those on whom I conferred the titles and because the simplest soldier had the right to aspire to the title of duke. I even believe that I was wrong because it was to weaken the principle of equality which pleased the whole nation. But if I had created dukes with French titles, you would have thought that I wanted to revive the old titles.

to live. to live forever.

Then, too, at sea—to use a homely but expressive phrase—you miss a man so much. A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark, upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces or new scenes to fill up the gap. There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered. There is one less to take up the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.

—a sailor's diary entry, on losing a shipmate, ca. 1834 (from Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr.)

The Holdovers (2023)

We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants; thanks to them, we see farther than they. Busying ourselves with the treatises written by the ancients, we take their choice thoughts, buried by age and human neglect, and we raise them, as it were from death to renewed life.

-Peter of Blois