Home > Work > Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City
1 " Opinions differ on the question of whether a golden age is something you can experience while it's happening or whether it only comes into focus on reflection...no matter how grand and prosperous and momentous the time in which you are living may be, its grandeur is inevitably stained by the incessant drabness of the present. "
― Russell Shorto , Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City
2 " For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much -- constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade -- that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out. "
3 " ...the curious Dutch classification gedogen, which means 'technically illegal but officially tolerated. "
4 " So how, in an increasingly interconnected world, do we integrate and still keep our values? "
5 " There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might “go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation”). "
6 " Where land was controlled by noblemen and/or the Church in other parts of Europe, in the province of Holland, circa 1500, only 5 percent of the land was owned by nobles, while peasants owned 45 percent of it. "
7 " For individual freedom can come about only, can be conceived only, if there is some sense of security to life. "
8 " You could look at the work of any Dutch master for an idea of the morning light we cycle through. There is a white cleanness to it, a rinsed quality. It’s a sober light, without, for example, any of the orange particulate glow you get from the Mediterranean sun. "
9 " a basic component of individual rights is the right to own property. "
10 " The Dutch were among the earliest adopters of a new technology—the printed book—and "
11 " There, she identified a recurring cycle that kept women in a downward spiral: families that were already poor and struggling to stay alive kept having more babies, dragging them down still further. In the 1870s she became the country’s first advocate for contraception, and one of the first anywhere. In the midst of a society and a medical profession that were rigorously Victorian in their attitudes about sex, she had patients conduct trials of contraceptives and concluded that the pessary, a kind of diaphragm, was the most effective birth control device. "
12 " There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might 'go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation'). "
13 " As happens so often in history at the dying of one age and the birth of another, an era of phenomenal ugliness, strife, and chaos was about to unfold. "
14 " [Charles the Fifth], pretty much every way worked to hold up the pillars of the medieval world order: monarchic power, domination by the Catholic Church, feudal land management, divine right, mercantile colonialization, and obedience to authority along the strict metaphysical line of the great chain of being. "
15 " You know what I’ve often said, ever since Auschwitz. Life is absurd. It has no meaning. But it has beauty, and wonder, and we have to enjoy that.” Her hand was still on his cheek, her arm "
16 " You know what I’ve often said, ever since Auschwitz. Life is absurd. It has no meaning. But it has beauty, and wonder, and we have to enjoy that. "