Quotes from Andrew Delbanco

As people spin faster and faster in the pursuit of merely personal happiness, they become exhausted in the futile effort of chasing themselves.

So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.

As one southern-born antislavery activist later wrote, it was a "sad satire to call [the] States 'United,'" because in one-half of the country slavery was basic to its way of life while in the other it was fading or already gone. The founding fathers tried to stitch these two nations together with no idea how long the stitching would hold.

To face this fact is to encounter one of the most demanding challenges in thinking about history: explaining how people in the past could have failed to see what seems so clear to us in retrospect. This is an imperative task but also a delicate and exacting one. On one hand, explanation can shade into excuse, on the other hand, passing judgment on the past can be a form of self-congratulation in the present.

Before dismissing such men as 'mediocre, timid, and weak,' one might ask oneself how many of us would welcome such a war, especially without the knowledge of hindsight?

It is the rare young writer who does not fall in love with the idea of becoming famous, and Melville was no exception. When he remarked years later to Hawthorne that no man "who is wise, will expect appreciative recognition from his fellows," he was reproving his younger self for having craved it.

Confronting this question takes us beyond a world where the line between good and evil is sharp and bright, into a gray confusion where navigation was soul-trying work.

Southerners who had insisted on states' rights now demanded federal intervention to enforce what they considered their property rights.

Another fugitive, writing in the 1820s compared the sight of the whipped slave's black to that of 'a field lately ploughed' and proposed with scalding irony that 'if it were not for the stripes on my back' he would bequent his own skin to the government to be used as parchment wrapping for tht 'charter of American liberty' the US Constitution.

Sixty years later, a child's primer titled The Anti-slavery Alphabet made the point in rhyme: S is the sugar, that the slave Is toiling hard to make, To put into your pie and tea Your candy and your cake

Beecher described slavery as an 'organic sin,' by which he meant that a sing that permeates the body politic so completely that it cannot be cured by targeted excision but must be overwhelmed with an infusion of love.

The Douglass of the memoirs is a paragon. There is little trace in him of the man who sometimes must have been petty, impulsive and vain--not a piece of property to be utilized in one way or another but, as one putative friend complained, a "haughty" and "self-possessed' man with the low as well as exalted desires that constitute freedom. To pretend otherwise is to treat him once again as less than human.

Between 1820 and 1830, only about a hundred novels by American writers were published in the United States; in the next decade, the number rose above three hundred, and in the 1840s, it leapt toward a thousand.

Typee was Melville's version of this American dream—not the dream of raising one's status in the world as it is, but the dream of starting over, getting out from under, and putting it all away to discover life anew. 6.

Cutting to the heart of the matter, Lincoln made the irrefutable point: "People of any color seldom run, unless there be something to run from." Two SLAVERY AND THE FOUNDERS 1.

Yet to imagine this outcome [slavery being impermissible everywhere] as somehow preordained is to be misguided by hindsight...Lincoln got it right when, shortly before his death, he called the result of the war 'astounding.

The young Melville felt constricted by prevailing standards of taste, and knew that in order to make a place for himself in the emerging American literary scene he would have to push his readers to expand their range of curiosity and tolerance.

The rebellion was over, the Union restored, and after more than two centuries there was no more slavery from which to run. The vast work of repairing its human devastation had barely begun.

Her complexion was a rich and mantling olive, and when watching the glow upon her cheeks I could almost swear that beneath the transparent medium there lurked the blushes of a faint vermilion.

And yet vile as it was, the fugitive slave law was also, ironically, a gift to antislavery activists, both black and white, because wherever it was enforced, it allowed them to show off human beings dragged back to the hell whence they came—a more potent aid to the cause than any speech or pamphlet.

The problem of the 1850s--how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union--was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.

The problem of the 1850s--how (for Southerners) to preserve slavery without destroying the Union, or (for Northerners) how to destroy slavery while preserving the Union--was a practical problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.

So we might say that the most important thing one can acquire in college is a well-functioning bullshit meter.