Battle Of Princeton Quotes

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; ’tis dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.

Of all the king’s officers who would die in battle during the long war against the Americans, more than one out of every eight had perished in four hours on a June afternoon above Charlestown.

Not many men ever saw Washington disturbed by bad news; it was much more likely to have the opposite effect on him, acting like a goad that brought out the best in his character, stiffening his resolve to win against odds that would have defeated a less resolute man before he began.

An officer who lost an eye or a limb would receive a year’s pay and medical expenses; the widows of officers killed in action would also get a year’s pay, plus another third for each child. Those who died of their wounds within six months were “deemed slain in battle.” No bonuses were announced for enlisted men.

Bradley is one of the few basketball players who have ever been appreciatively cheered by a disinterested away-from-home crowd while warming up. This curious event occurred last March, just before Princeton eliminated the Virginia Military Institute, the year's Southern Conference champion, from the NCAA championships. The game was played in Philadelphia and was the last of a tripleheader. The people there were worn out, because most of them were emotionally committed to either Villanova or Temple-two local teams that had just been involved in enervating battles with Providence and Connecticut, respectively, scrambling for a chance at the rest of the country. A group of Princeton players shooting basketballs miscellaneously in preparation for still another game hardly promised to be a high point of the evening, but Bradley, whose routine in the warmup time is a gradual crescendo of activity, is more interesting to watch before a game than most players are in play. In Philadelphia that night, what he did was, for him, anything but unusual. As he does before all games, he began by shooting set shots close to the basket, gradually moving back until he was shooting long sets from 20 feet out, and nearly all of them dropped into the net with an almost mechanical rhythm of accuracy. Then he began a series of expandingly difficult jump shots, and one jumper after another went cleanly through the basket with so few exceptions that the crowd began to murmur. Then he started to perform whirling reverse moves before another cadence of almost steadily accurate jump shots, and the murmur increased. Then he began to sweep hook shots into the air. He moved in a semicircle around the court. First with his right hand, then with his left, he tried seven of these long, graceful shots-the most difficult ones in the orthodoxy of basketball-and ambidextrously made them all. The game had not even begun, but the presumably unimpressible Philadelphians were applauding like an audience at an opera.

Albert Einstein trendedir. Bütün ceplerini ve çantalarını araştırmasına karşın biletini bulamaz. Bu arada kontrolör yaklaşır ve şöyle bir şeyler söyler: "Dr. Einstein, sizi herkes tanır. Princeton'un size başka bir tren bileti alacak parası olduğunu da biliyoruz." Einstein'in yanıtı da şöyle olur: "Benim endişem para değil. Bileti bulmak zorundayım, çünkü nereye gittiğimi unuttum." Tıpkı Einstein gibi, sizler de para için değil, nereye gittiğiniz için endişelenmelisiniz. Nereye gittiğinizi keşfederseniz, para da zaten gelir.

HOW GOOD A GENERAL WAS GEORGE WASHINGTON? IF WE CONSULT the statistics as they might have been kept if he had been a boxer or a quarterback, the figures are not encouraging. In seven years of fighting the British, from 1775 to 1782, he won only three clear-cut victories—at Trenton, Princeton, and Yorktown. In seven other encounters—Long Island, Harlem Heights, White Plains, Fort Washington, Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth—he either was defeated or at best could claim a draw. He never won a major battle. Trenton was essentially a raid, Princeton was little more than a large skirmish, and Yorktown was a siege in which the blockading French fleet was an essential component of the victory.

Two hours later, Revere trotted into Lexington, his mount thoroughly lathered after outgalloping a pair of Gage’s equestrian sentinels near Charlestown. Veering north toward the Mystic River to avoid further trouble, Revere had alerted almost every farmstead and minute captain within shouting distance. Popular lore later credited him with a stirring battle cry—“The British are coming!”—but a witness quoted him as warning, more prosaically, “The regulars are coming out.” Now he carried the alarm to the Reverend Jonas Clarke’s parsonage, just up the road from Lexington Common. Here Clarke had written three thousand sermons in twenty years; here he called up the stairs each morning to rouse his ten children—“Polly, Betsey, Lucy, Liddy, Patty, Sally, Thomas, Jonas, William, Peter, get up!” And here he had given sanctuary, in a bedroom to the left of the front door, to the renegades Hancock and Samuel Adams. A squad of militiamen stood guard at the house as Revere dismounted, spurs clanking. Two warnings had already come from the east: as many as nine mounted British officers had been seen patrolling the Middlesex roads, perhaps “upon some evil design.” At the door, a suspicious orderly sergeant challenged Revere, and Clarke blocked his path until Hancock reportedly called out, “Come in, Revere, we’re not afraid of you.” The herald delivered his message: British regulars by the hundreds were coming out, first by boat, then on foot. There was not a moment to lose.

The CRT is really hard. But here’s the strange thing. Do you know the easiest way to raise people’s scores on the test? Make it just a little bit harder. The psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer tried this a few years ago with a group of undergraduates at Princeton University. First they gave the CRT the normal way, and the students averaged 1.9 correct answers out of three. That’s pretty good, though it is well short of the 2.18 that MIT students averaged. Then Alter and Oppenheimer printed out the test questions in a font that was really hard to read—a 10 percent gray, 10-point italics Myriad Pro font—so that it looked like this: 1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? The average score this time around? 2.45. Suddenly, the students were doing much better than their counterparts at MIT.

Rockton is no more Oliver than Churchgrove is Lord Kirkwood,” Lady Minerva said stoutly. “Then why did you steal my name for him?” Oliver asked. “It’s not quite your name, old chap,” Lord Gabriel said. “And you know perfectly well that Minerva likes to tweak your nose from time to time.” “Stop calling me ‘old,’ blast it,” Oliver grumbled. “I’m not some doddering fool.” “How old are you, anyway?” Maria asked him, amused by his vanity. “Thirty-five.” Mrs. Plumtree had said little until now, but apparently the conversation had piqued her interest. “That’s long past the age when a man should marry, don’t you think, Miss Butterfield?” Aware of Oliver’s gaze on her, Maria chose her words carefully. “I suppose it depends on the man. Papa didn’t marry until he was nearly that age. He was too busy fighting in the Revolutionary War to court anyone.” When the blood drained from Mrs. Plumtree’s face, Oliver’s eyes held a glint of triumph. “Ah, yes, the Revolutionary War. Did I forget to mention, Gran, that Mr. Butterfield was a soldier in the Continental Marines?” The table got very quiet. Lady Minerva focused on eating her soup. Lady Celia took several sips of wine, one after another, and Lord Jarret stared into his soup bowl as if it contained the secret to life. The only real sound punctuating the silence was Lord Gabriel’s muttered “bloody hell.” Clearly, there was some undercurrent here that Maria didn’t understand. Oliver was watching his grandmother again like a wolf about to pounce, and Mrs. Plumtree was clearly contemplating which weapon would best hold the wolf at bay. “Uncle Adam was a hero,” Freddy put in, oblivious as usual to undercurrents of any kind. “At the Battle of Princeton, he held off ten of the British until help could arrive. It was just him and his bayonet, slashing and stabbing-“ “Freddy,” Maria chided under her breath, “our hosts are British, remember?

Suddenly the sky collapsed into darkness and a dozen bright stars appeared. In their midst hung an awful, black ball, rimmed in ruby red and surrounded by the doomsday glow of the gray corona. No photograph can do justice to this appalling sight: The dynamic range from bright to dark is too great, and the colors are literally unearthly. (The ionized gas of the solar corona is hotter than anything gets on Earth except, momentarily, in the detonation of a hydrogen bomb, and is thinner than a laboratory vacuum.) I staggered back a few steps, like a drunken man—or like the Medes and Lydians, who stopped fighting and made peace when a solar eclipse interrupted their battle in 585 B.C. Observers more disciplined than myself have taken leave of their senses at just this moment. The astronomer Charles A. Young of Princeton University berated himself for falling into a trance during the 1869 solar eclipse in Iowa and failing to carry out his scientific tasks: “I cannot describe the sensation of surprise and mortification, of personal imbecility and wasted opportunity that overwhelmed me when the sunlight flashed out,” he recalled.

To Bogle—who had years earlier battled with Samuelson’s textbook at Princeton—the column was electrifying. It inspired his future mantra that “strategy follows structure,” and this was a strategy that arguably suited Vanguard’s hamstrung structure perfectly. The few existing index funds were almost solely the preserve of pension funds, and while they were beginning to gain traction, none of Vanguard’s competitors in the mutual fund industry—mostly aimed at ordinary investors—would want to start a low-cost product that might show up its pricier, traditional actively managed funds. Meanwhile, Vanguard’s at-cost structure was the perfect match. Plus, he obviously knew a few gunslingers in Boston whom he wouldn’t mind humbling.

The years 1880–1913 constitute the great era of laissez-faire in world economic history—the reign of the classical gold standard, in which governments around the globe had allowed an unprecedented degree of economic activity within and between their nations to be regulated by the market-driven transfer of gold claims across borders (the physical stuff itself just shifted around in central bank vaults). The year 1933, in stark contrast, saw the world mired in the Great Depression, with the gold standard in tatters, trade decimated, and unemployment at previously unimagined levels.

Under the gold standard, exchange rates were fixed, so that the balance of payments had to adjust through domestic deflation. White, like Keynes, concluded that it should be the other way around. “I believe there is definitive evidence,” White wrote, “that alterations in the domestic price level are far more costly to the nation than frequent alterations in the exchange rate would be.” The United States “would be courting trouble to place ourselves in a position similar to that which we found ourselves between 1929 and 1933,” a period of persistent deflation.

White therefore wanted to rewrite the rules of the American monetary system to give a revamped Federal Reserve far more discretionary powers than the gold standard could accommodate, and then convince the rest of the world to help make such a new system stick internationally.

The fraying relic of the gold-exchange standard that remained at the end of the 1920s had collapsed entirely by 1934. Britain, its inspiration and foundation in the nineteenth century, abandoned it with great reluctance and bitterness in September 1931. Twenty-five nations followed in short order. The United States refused to throw in the towel until April 1933, shortly after Roosevelt took office.

President Herbert Hoover had tried to preserve the gold standard by means of trade restrictions; Roosevelt maneuvered in the other direction, moving away from multilateralism in money while trying to preserve it in trade.

The drama of the final collapse of the gold-exchange standard would poison Anglo-American relations for decades. To the British way of thinking, Britain had been ignominiously forced off gold by selfish and short-sighted American and French policies: the Americans with their abominable import tariffs, and the French with their wretched devaluations. The Americans, for their part, saw themselves as innocent victims of an odious British default.

In the previous chapter, we saw the power of working together within and across disciplines. But traditional collaboration tends to involve teams with limited and tightly focused membership. Only a select few are invited to work on projects at Le Laboratoire or conduct research in those open-format labs at Columbia and Princeton. Crowdsourcing means taking a problem normally tackled by the few and putting it to the many. In the wrong hands, it might only deliver a quick blast of publicity or some cheap market research. Used properly, however, the crowd can be a powerful ally in the battle to solve hard problems. You can ask the crowd to gather or mine data. You can invite it to test and judge solutions.