“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.”
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Thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist Mugai Nyodai, the world’s first Zen abbess, struggled to achieve enlightenment until, one night during her training, the bottom fell out of an old bamboo-bound pail she was using to carry water. The spill freed her. “No more water in the pail!” she wrote in a poem commemorating the experience. “No more moon in the water!”
“Pompeii like any other town,” Herman Melville wrote in his journal during an 1867 visit. “Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive. Pompeii comfortable sermon. Like Pompeii better than Paris.”
In 1961 Mary Ingraham Bunting established the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, a research center for women with PhDs or “the equivalent” in creative achievement who had been forced to leave academia and the workforce. A 1960 brochure advertising the program warns that “this sense of stagnation can become a malignant factor even in the best of marriages,” but that women no longer need be “crusaders and reformers” because “the bitter battles for women’s rights are history.”
In an 1899 treatise written while in exile, Vladimir Lenin critiqued the capitalist growth of Russian industries in which factory workers had replaced skilled craftsmen. Among his concerns was a shift toward the mass production of cheap accordions, which, he complained, “have nearly everywhere displaced the primitive string folk instrument, the balalaika.”
“There were very few beauties,” wrote Jane Austen to her sister about a party she attended in 1800. The two Miss Maitlands had “a good deal of nose”; the General, “the gout”; Mrs. Maitland, “the jaundice”; and regarding Susan, Sally, and Miss Debary, Austen was “as civil to them as their bad breath would allow.”
“Six days, six weeks. I doubt six months,” said Donald Rumsfeld, on February 7, 2003, about the duration of the Iraq war. “Whatever happens in Vietnam, I can conceive of nothing except military victory,” Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1967. Four years before that, Robert McNamara asserted, “The war in Vietnam is going well and will succeed.”
It is said that while campaigning in southern Louisiana, Huey Long was told that many voters were Catholic. “When I was a boy,” he began speeches, “I would get up at six o’clock in the morning on Sunday, and I would take my Catholic grandparents to mass. I would bring them home, and at ten o’clock I would hitch the old horse up again, and I would take my Baptist parents to church.” A colleague later said, “I didn’t know you had any Catholic grandparents.” To which he replied, “Don’t be a damned fool. We didn’t even have a horse.”
John Florio’s 1603 translation of Michel de Montaigne’s essays contains an early instance of the word emotion being used to refer to feelings distinct from reasoning. Unsure of the word’s merits, Florio included it on a list of “uncouth termes” he apologized to readers for introducing into English from the French.
According to film director Joe Swanberg, a significant number of people believe that an obscure 1985 film about mind control was not in fact real, and that they had dreamed the particulars of the Quebecois film. “The Peanut Butter Solution,” wrote Swanberg, “successfully convinced young viewers that they dreamed it rather than watched it.”
“By its policy,” wrote Vitruvius between 30 bc and 15 bc, the Roman Empire “curbs the courage of the northern barbarians; by its strength, the imaginative south. Thus the divine mind has allotted to the Roman state an excellent and temperate region in order to rule the world.”
In love with the same slave girl, Iris, two men in first-century Pompeii fought via graffiti. Severus tagged the wall first, writing that Iris did not love Successus, adding, “His rival wrote this.” Successus responded, “Don’t even think to speak badly of a man more handsome than you, especially one who is both most vicious when crossed and yet also good.” “I have written all there is to say,” Severus retorted. “You love Iris, but she does not love you.”
Union general William T. Sherman believed newspaper correspondents to be liabilities. “A spy is one who furnishes an enemy with knowledge useful to him and dangerous to us,” Sherman wrote in an 1863 letter. “I say—in giving intelligence to the enemy, in sowing discord and discontent in an army—these men fulfill all the conditions of spies.”
The city of Baltimore has a history of election riots, but the rise of the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s further exacerbated election violence. One affiliated gang, the Blood Tubs, took barrels of blood from butchers, threw Germans and Irishmen into them, and then chased the bloodied victims down the street. By 1856 Know-Nothings had won local, state, and national contests.
Not long before his death in 961, Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman III testified that over his fifty years of reign, during which “riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call,” he had “diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness.” Al-Rahman had counted only fourteen. “O man,” he lamented, “place not thy confidence in this present world!”