Quote of the Day posts

"Tonight we got Hayfield. Like all the other schools in this conference they're all white. They don't have to worry about race. We do. But we're better for it."

—Coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) in Remember the Titans. It's not a good movie — there are very dishonest parts — but these lines, part of the "big game" speech, resonate beyond the film. They articulate my hopes about our country. Other countries, in Asia, in Europe, haven't really been dealing with racial matters for as long as we have, and haven't gone as far as we have. And I like to think we're better for it. 

“I have been watching my life. It's right there. I keep scratching at it, trying to get into it.”

—Don Draper (Jon Hamm) on this week's episode of “Mad Men.” 

"The informers about this time began to accuse wealthy men of charging more than the legal interest on loans—one and a half per cent was all that they were allowed to charge. The statute about it had long fallen in abeyance and hardly a single senator was innocent of infringing it. But Tiberius upheld its validity. A deputation went to him and pleaded that everyone should be allowed a year and a half to adjust his private finances to conform with the letter of the law, and Tiberius as a great favour granted the request. The result was that all debts were at once called in, and this caused a great shortage of current coin. Tiberius' great idle hoards of gold and silver in the Treasury had been responsible for forcing up the rate of interest in the first place, and now there was a financial panic and land-values fell to nothing."

— Robert Graves' I, Claudius, page 368-69

"The pay was certainly insufficient: the soliders had to arm and equip themselves out of it and prices had risen. And certainly the exhaustion of military reserves had kept thousands of soliders with the Colours who should have been discharged years before, and veterans were recalled to the Colours who who were quite unfit for service..."

— Robert Graves' I, Claudius, page 199, on a mutiny that broke out among Roman soldiers along the Rhine.