Accounts varied of the Great Famine of 1315–22, during which more than 10 percent of Europe’s population died. In Flanders: “Parents killed their children and children killed parents, and the bodies of executed criminals were eagerly snatched from the gallows.” In France: “There was no wine in the whole kingdom.”
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Thomas Jefferson never wrote or said, “I’m a great believer in luck. The harder I work the more I seem to have.” The quip was crafted by San Francisco humorist Coleman Cox for a 1922 collection titled Listen to This.
“Secretary Morrice did this day in the House, when they talked of intelligence, say that he was allowed but £700 a year,” wrote Samuel Pepys in his diary in 1668, “whereas, in Cromwell’s time, he did allow £70,000 a year for it; and was confirmed therein by Colonel Birch, who said that thereby Cromwell carried the secrets of all the princes of Europe at his girdle.”
After serving a three-month prison sentence in 1927 for oltraggio, the crime of uttering insults against public figures, Italian workman Aristido Beccatti owed a 300-lire fine. Upon being told of the situation, Benito Mussolini, the insulted public figure, sent Beccatti a 500-lire check.
“The image you get from reading the Roe v. Wade opinion is it’s mostly a doctor’s-rights case—a doctor’s right to prescribe what he thinks his patient needs,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in a 2018 interview with legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen. “My idea of how choice should have developed was not a privacy notion, not a doctor’s-right notion, but a woman’s right to control her own destiny, to be able to make choices without a Big Brother state telling her what she can and cannot do.”
Noah Webster, creator of the first widely used American English dictionary, wrote that “the English, neglecting the beauty and regularity of their own language, adopt foreign words in their foreign spelling; thus incommoding all ordinary readers among their own citizens, and multiplying anomalies, till the orthography of their language falls little short of the confusion of tongues at Babel.”
Primary school students in eastern Nigeria are encouraged to focus on their education with a song whose lyrics translate as “Education is sweet but hard to learn, but with patience, you can succeed if your parents have the white man’s money.”
As a child in Mexico in the 1650s, the nun and writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz “abstained from eating cheese because I had heard that it made one slow of wits, for in me the desire for learning was stronger than the desire for eating—as powerful as that is in children.”
“If ever a loss at sea fell under the definition, in the terms of a bill of lading, of Act of God,” Joseph Conrad wrote, “this one does, in its magnitude, suddenness, and severity; and in the chastening influence it should have on the self-confidence of mankind.” The sentence ends the first paragraph of his 1912 essay “Some Reflections on the Loss of the Titanic.”
“Why is life a perpetual preparation for something that never happens?” W.B. Yeats asked in his journal, September 16, 1909.
“Thank the good God we have all got through and the only family that did not eat human flesh,” wrote fourteen-year-old Virginia Reed, a surviving Donner Party member, in an 1847 letter. “Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody and never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can.” Reed reported being “pleased with California, particularly with the climate.”
“The difference between us is very marked,” wrote Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman in 1868. “Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night.”
In 1923 Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg declined painter Wassily Kandinsky’s offer to join the Bauhaus, having heard that other members of the school were anti-Semitic. “For I have at last learned the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year,” Schoenberg wrote to Kandinsky, “and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely a human being (at least, the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me), but I am a Jew.”
“When summer and winter separate,” wrote Hildegard of Bingen circa 1158, “so that either summer recedes and winter arrives or winter recedes and summer arrives, then a certain mixed substance appears, flying in the air, like a whiteness of threads, where the air is purifying itself.”
In 1937 the Dewey Commission conducted an investigation into the charges against Leon Trotsky made during Joseph Stalin’s Moscow show trials. “Of what country are you a citizen, Mr. Trotsky?” the commission asked. “I am deprived of my citizenship in the Soviet Union. I am not a citizen of any country,” Trostky replied. “What, if anything, did you do when you were informed of the deprivation of your citizenship?” “I wrote an article about it,” he said. “I am a man armed with a pen.”