Jerry Pournelle Quotes

Taking it as a whole, Mexico is a grand city, and, as Cortes truly said, its situation is marvellous.

The Zocalo is a magnificent space, at least four times the size of Trafalagar Square, with the National Palace on one side, the huge cathedral on the other, and in one corner part of the old Aztec City so brutally destroyed by Hernan Cortez and the Conquistadores.

I was born in Mexico, I am from Mexico City.

There are two ways to look at the Alamo—through the eyes of history and through the eyes of myth, and I found that myth wins out pretty much every time.

History is like Santa Claus: a language construction. We have some registers about the existence of Santa and history - the presents under the tree, the archives - but none have really seen them.

I played the Azteca Stadium in Mexico to 100,000 people - that's something I never thought I'd do.

History is delusional. Not just an illusion, it's a delusion. America is this giant country, so it has these big delusions, and history is where delusions play out.

There's a natural tendency to sanitize and polish any historical icon whether it be George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Martin Luther King saying, "I have a dream."

When I was doing preliminary research on this case, I remembered the story about Tlazolteotl.' [Mulder] glanced at the old archaeologist. 'Am I pronouncing it correctly? It sounds like I'm swallowing a turtle.

It is said, in Imardin, that the wind has a soul, and that it wails through the narrow streets because it is grieved by what it finds there.

History is all explained by geography.

A story can be new and yet tell about olden times. The past comes into existence with the story.

You pick up very well-known books on Lincoln [and] you will find almost no reference to his long-term belief in colonization. Why? Because it doesn't fit the image of the Great Emancipator. It doesn't fit the retrospective view we want to have of Lincoln as the man who was the moralist in politics, who came into office committed to ending slavery and waited to sign this document.

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, he began at the moment that it broke out, believing that it would be a great war, and more memorable than any that had preceded it.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don't start the earthquakes and don't stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.

Not a stone but has its history.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes.

Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.

I may remind you that history is not a branch of literature. The facts of history, like the facts of geology or astronomy, can supply material for literary art; for manifest reasons they lend themselves to artistic representation far more readily than those of the natural sciences; but to clothe the story of human society in a literary dress is no more the part of a historian as a historian, than it is the part of an astronomer as an astronomer to present in an artistic shape the story of the stars.

History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.

I won't be remembered for my writing. I'll be remembered as Scott's mistress.

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.

Australians and New Zealanders don't talk about Gallipoli in terms of invasion. I started talking about it and using that word and at first there were a few people who were getting upset in the same way that in any country, if you work for a newspaper you know exactly the dude you can go and talk to get a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to something to do with the military.

The story of the eighties will be the story of the Reagan administration and the many men and women who served in it, some of whom are already out on parole.