Felipe Fernández-Armesto QUOTES

1 " [P]art of the pleasure of engaging with a writer is unraveling some allusions and admitting defeat by others. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature

2 " History has no course. It thrashes and staggers, swivels and twists, but never heads one way for long. Humans who get caught up in it try to give it destinations. But we all pull in different directions, heading for different targets, and tend to cancel each other's influence out. When trends last for a short spell, we sometimes ascribe them to "men of destiny" or "history makers", or to great movements -- collectively heroic or myopic - or to immense, impersonal forces or laws of social development or economic change: class struggle, for instance, or "progress" or "development" or some other form of History with a capital H. But usually some undetectably random event is responsible for initiating big change. History is a system reminiscent of the weather: the flap of a butterfly's wings can stir up a storm. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , 1492: The Year the World Began

3 " Unless US citizens acknowledge and understand their country's imperial past, they will not be able to understand its present or future. Much of the recent and current Hispanic resettlement of parts of the United States is a consequence of empire.... Countercolonization follows colonization, and the waves of migrants always flow back like returning tides. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

4 " There has never been nationhood without falsehood. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto

5 " to become a great saint, it is no bad first step to be a big sinner. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , 1492: The Year the World Began

6 " Capitalism seems to have failed and is now stigmatized as greed. A reaction against individual excess is driving the world back to collective values. Fear of terror overrides rights; fear of slumps subverts free markets. Consumption levels and urbanization are simply unsustainable at recent rates in the face of environmental change. The throwaway society is headed for the trash heap. People who sense that “modernity” is ending proclaim a “postmodern age. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , 1492: The Year the World Began

7 " To understand what was in Ivan’s mind, one has to think back to what the world was like before Machiavelli. The modern calculus of profit and loss probably meant nothing to Ivan. He never thought about realpolitik. His concerns were with tradition and posterity, history and fame, apocalypse and eternity. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , 1492: The Year the World Began

8 " Only three routes of upward mobility were available to socially ambitious upstarts such as Columbus: war, the Church, and the sea. Columbus probably contemplated all three: he wanted a clerical career for one of his brothers, and fancied himself as “a captain of cavaliers and conquests.” But seafaring was a natural choice, especially for a boy from a maritime community as single-minded as that of Genoa. Opportunities for employment and profit abounded. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , 1492: The Year the World Began

9 " All definitions of civilization along to a conjugation which goes: "I am civilized, you belong to a culture, he is a barbarian. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto

10 " Like poor immigrants throughout the ages, Jews there adjusted to the jobs no one else would do. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , 1492: The Year the World Began

11 " it aligns the cannibals with their real modern counterparts: those who eat “health” diets for self-improvement or worldly success or moral superiority or enhanced beauty or personal purity. Strangely, cannibals turn out to have a lot in common with vegans. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food

12 " in their supposed innocence of and opposition to empire, have become the mythic progenitors of the United States—almost as improbably as Solomon was of Ethiopia or Aeneas of Rome or his suppositious brother, Brut, of Britain. But almost everything most Americans think about the Plymouth colonists of 1620 is false. The truth is more credible. The first colonists in Massachusetts, exchanging accusations of “bestial, yea, diabolical affectations,” were as divided and conflicted as people usually are when fate flings them together. Their leaders did not seek "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

13 " Disdain for blacks as inherently inferior to other people and the pretense that reason and humanity are proportional to the pink pigment in Western flesh were new prejudices. Disgust with Mali fed them. Attitudes remained equivocal, but the balance of white assumptions tilted against blacks. If white respect for black societies had survived the encounter with Mali, how different might the subsequent history of the world have been? "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , 1492: The Year the World Began

14 " An age of expansion really did begin, but the phenomenon was of an expanding world, not, as some historians say, of European expansion. The world did not simply wait passively for European outreach to transform it as if touched by a magic wand. Other societies were already working magic of their own, turning states into empires and cultures into civilizations. Some of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding societies of the fifteenth century were in the Americas, southwest and northern Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , 1492: The Year the World Began

15 " The myth of Native Americans’ talent for conservationism before the arrival of the white man is belied by the evidence of the scale of their slaughters. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food

16 " Their ships were steeds, and they rode the waves like jennets. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

17 " Chinese naval activity, for instance, was aborted after Zheng He’s last voyage, probably as a result of "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration

18 " Yet despite these advantages, England’s empire remained unlaunched until the seventeenth century. The problem is a dog-in-the-night "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

19 " Cannibalism is a problem. In many cases the practice is rooted in ritual and superstition rather than gastronomy, but not always. A French Dominican in the seventeenth century observed that the Caribs had most decided notions of the relative merits of their enemies. As one would expect, the French were delicious, by far the best. This is no surprise, even allowing for nationalism. The English came next, I’m glad to say. The Dutch were dull and stodgy and the Spaniards so stringy, they were hardly a meal at all, even boiled. All this sounds sadly like gluttony. —PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food

20 " Great Britain, for instance, is too big and too diverse to be home to a small-island civilization, but in modern times the English—though not, I think, other peoples of the island—have cultivated what might be called a small-island mentality: all their most tiresome history books stress, sometimes in their opening words, that their history is a function of their insularity. They still write and read histories with such titles as Our Island Story and The Offshore Islanders.4The conviction that their island “arose from the azure main” and is like a gem “set in the silver sea” resounds in national songs and scraps of verse which they hear repeatedly. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the English invested heavily in naval security. They created the cult of the “English eccentric”—which is a way of idealizing the outcome of isolation. They have projected an image as “a singular race, one which prides itself on being a little mad. "

― Felipe Fernández-Armesto , Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature

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