Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" We think of Washington as the defensive-minded pragmatist who won the Revolution by avoiding unnecessary risks on the battlefield. But that was not how he started out. "

Related Quotes:

" He was born in 1741, a descendant of the Rhode Island equivalent of royalty. The first Benedict Arnold had been one of the colony's founders, and subsequent generations had helped to establish the Arnolds as solid and respected citizens. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

Born

First

Royalty

" I hated the fact that I had to read 'Moby-Dick' as a senior in high school. "

" I watch a lot of bad TV. I spend my entire day reading and writing, and after dinner my idea of fun is just to watch a lot of bad TV. That's how I relax and stay in touch with modern culture. "

" Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated. "

" As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books. "

" You know, if you're at home with children, you lose twenty-five IQ points. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

Home

Lose

" What's been largely forgotten is that Washington was highly passionate and aggressive, and it was only after losing Philadelphia to the British after a string of disastrous battlefield performances that he finally resigned himself to the more conservative approach with which he has since become associated. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

Philadelphia

Conservative

" To my mind, an adventure is something a person willingly undertakes. "

" The American Revolution as it actually unfolded was so troubling and strange that once the struggle was over, a generation did its best to remove all traces of the truth. "

" In all natural disasters through time, man needs to attach meaning to tragedy, no matter how random and inexplicable the event is. "

" The great lesson I get from 'Moby-Dick' is that when the times are bad, when there is great foreboding, there are still ways to go about living. It's through Ishmael that I find a kind of overall cosmic approach to a meaningful life in this meaningless world. "

" Martin Scorsese, everything he does, I've got to see. And Jack Nicholson, I've got to see what he does. "

" Even though I hadn't read a word of it, I grew up hating 'Moby-Dick.' "

Nathaniel Philbrick

Word

Though

" After Brown, I went to Duke, to a Ph.D. program in American literature. My dad's an English professor. After a year there, I was like, 'Jesus. I don't want to do this. I don't want to be in the library.' So I pulled the ripcord, and that was it. "

" I had a great AP U.S. History teacher in Pittsburgh. We still exchange Christmas cards. She was the first teacher who said I was a good writer - and I'd never heard that before. And so I remember that, and I remember that level of loving the material and really loving writing about it. "

" Some of my books sort of have a provocative take. Sometimes you find interesting things about characters that show they weren't necessarily the way people usually see them. It can make for lively conversations, but that's great. Spark a little controversy, get people to think about it. That's what it's all about. "

" History is obviously dependent on the evidence, and it's always amazing to me how much evidence there is. "

" Nantucket was a Quaker-based culture, so they were not readers. There's a great Nantucket-based novel from the 19th century that Melville read for his research for 'Moby-Dick': 'Miriam Coffin' by Joseph Hart. "

" Reading 'Moby-Dick' helps you discover how to live. "

" There's an ugly civil war side to revolutionary Boston that we don't often talk about and a lot of thuggish, vigilante behavior by groups like the Sons of Liberty. "

" I follow the Patriots, but the Steelers were my first and true love. I still have a 'Terrible Towel.' "

Nathaniel Philbrick

True

True Love

" It is impossible to say when 37-year-old Benedict Arnold first met 18-year-old Peggy Shippen, but we do know that on September 25, 1778, he wrote her a love letter - much of it an exact copy of one he'd sent to another woman six months before. But if the overheated rhetoric was recycled, Arnold's passion was genuine. "

" I don't subscribe to the idea that the founders or anyone else were somehow better than us and that we have to live up to their example. "

Nathaniel Philbrick

Idea

Example

" We think of the revolution ending in Yorktown, Va. The fact of the matter is that the French defeated the British in a naval battle right in the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Because the British fleet was coming to rescue Cornwallis, the British general, Washington was able to surround Cornwallis. "

" I was an English major at Brown. I never enjoyed history classes. "

" I'm a big Stephen King fan. "

" More than 25 miles off the coast of Massachusetts and only 14 miles long, Nantucket is, as Herman Melville wrote in 'Moby-Dick,' 'away off shore.' "

Nathaniel Philbrick

Shore

Miles

" Whatever you read, there's no better place to read than the cockpit or the berth of a boat. It's kind of like being in a womb. "

" I'm not one of these people who want to tear down our heroes and that kind of thing. "

" Joseph Warren, like a lot of revolutionary leaders, was into Enlightenment literature. "