Christina Of Sweden Quotes

We should never believe anything we have not dared to doubt.

I love the storm and fear the calm.

To obey no one is a greater happiness than to command the whole world.

This is the story of my childhood in Brazil, about the culture shock I experienced when I arrived in the forests of northern Sweden and about the loss of the

Which crime has the female sex committed to be sentenced to the harsh necessity which consists of being locked up all life either as a prisoner or a slave? I call the nuns prisoners and the married women slaves.

I say this explicitly, that it is impossible for me to marry. That is the way it is for me. My temper is a mortal enemy to this horrible yoke, which I would not accept, even if I thus would become the ruler of the world.

This is the story of my childhood in Brazil, about the culture shock I experienced when I arrived in the forests of northern Sweden and about the loss of the people I loved most. It’s about what I remember of my childhood in the Brazilian wilderness, on the streets of São Paulo, in the orphanage. And it’s about my early days in Sweden, when I found myself dropped into a place and life that couldn’t have been in sharper contrast to what I had known. My memories are scattered, but the ones that remain are very clear. I have tended them carefully, repeated them to myself, and written them down to try to preserve the person I was. I created this story, my story. I don’t remember exactly how old I was when each thing happened, or how long I stayed at each place.

I was eight years old when I came to Sweden, and my brother was twenty-two months. We are half siblings. We have the same mother but different fathers. In the adoption papers, I can read who Patrick’s father is, but in mine, the line for father is empty. I wonder if that means I’ll never find out who my biological father is. It feels weird to say that Patrick and I are half siblings. Maybe that’s because I didn’t know my father or Patrick’s. Because our fathers were absent, I’ve always viewed Patrick as my full brother. Maybe being adopted and getting a new mother and father also strengthened the bond between us as brother and sister. We became a family, a family defined not by blood, but by circumstances, by chance and, who knows, maybe by something inexplicable.

According to my Brazilian papers, I was born on April 30, 1983. That was also the thirty-seventh birthday of the king of Sweden, on the far side of the Atlantic from Diamantina, Brazil, where I took my first breaths. When I was little, Mamãe (the Portuguese word for mother) used to tell me that I was born in the woods, that my father was an Indian, so I was half-Indian. I don’t know whether this is true. I don’t know whether she embellished the story a bit, made it a little nicer than saying she didn’t know who my father was, or that he didn’t want anything to do with us. But I’ve always liked her version, and for many years I chose to believe it. A part of me still wants to believe it’s true. What I know and remember is that I spent my first years in the woods and caves outside of Diamantina with my mother

It is a far greater happiness to obey no one than to rule the whole world.

Francisco Pizarro and Hernán Cortés, in the early sixteenth century, ravaged the Inca and Aztec. Queen Christina of Sweden seized a thousand paintings from Prague in 1648 and paid her generals in artwork. Napoleon stole to endow the Louvre, and Stalin to stock the Hermitage.

At 1.5 children per Swedish female (The Swedish Institute 1997), the rate is so low that deaths in Sweden outpaced births in 1997; immigration, however, compensated for the population shortfall. Sweden

Although Sweden’s labor party, the Social Democrats, has been in power for most of the past seventy years, state ownership of business has ranked lower than in many industrialized countries; in 1997 the state owned less than 10 percent of businesses compared with over 30 percent in France (Rekdal 1997). In

To Swedes, however, socialism refers to caring for society as a whole and extending social welfare to all. Compared with the United States, where the individual’s rights tend to come first, Sweden places more emphasis on the benefit to the group than on the benefit to the individual.

Nearly 90 percent of the price of a bottle of Swedish brännvin is tax (the more liberal EU import limits could drastically cut the state’s income). Sweden tries to justify its policies by advertising the health benefits of teetotaling in its stores. Based

Socialism is not the same as social democracy, the political system that created Sweden’s welfare state.

Sweden’s position of neutrality during World War II put the country in the position of not defending its neighbors against German invasion. This was not forgotten in Norway and Denmark and caused animosity in the past, but the nations have put the past behind them. Some

In Sweden, everyone is assumed to have similar resources, so it seems inappropriate to pay for someone else.

This period saw the establishment of the first Swedish colony in America. On March 1, 1638, a large party of Swedes, who had crossed the ocean under the command of the celebrated Peter Minuit, took possession of land on the banks of the Delaware River. They called their settlement (on the site that later became Wilmington) Fort Christina, after their royal princess, and the colony which they were founding New Sweden. The first Lutheran congregation in America was established here by the Reverend Reorus Porkillus and five years later, the colonists from Delaware pushed into what is now Pennsylvania, where they founded the settlement of Upland, on the site where Chester now stands. Among the gifts these first Swedish colonists brought to America were the log cabin and the steam bath. The new colony, which never numbered more than 200 Swedes, did not long survive. In 1655, it was attacked and captured by the Dutch, who incorporated New Sweden into what was then New Netherland.