David Hartley Quotes

The only sheets I'll ever long for are my own.

What must be done must be done, whatever the price, the cost, the pain. One day we all must walk through fire.

You speak as if this is a good world with a little evil in it. Rubbish. It's a hellish one where the best a man can do is put a little sanity back and look after his own.

It's a long ride home with nothing but me for company. I bore myself sometimes. Not often. Just now and again.

And still you'll hesitate to tell him, won't you? Why? Because you're a woman? Is your destiny such a small thing then? To keep your legs open and your mouth shut?

...the antidote to death was and always would be the heat and fury of life itself.

There are no secrets.' The thing smiled, showing a row of even, childlike teeth. 'None worth keeping. Only the ones you hide from yourself, which are the most damaging and hurtful of all. Truth is truth, and lie is lie. Tell yourself one's the other and all the world turns kilter.

David Hartley appeared of the earth, of the moors. A man of smoke and peat and heather and fire, his body built for the hills. Where one began the other ended.

I've no need of reasons. The doing's enough.' Well said for once, the girl thought. The doing was everything.

We spent today sending men to hell. What's more natural than to pass the night dreaming of procreating a few more to take their place?

After which, he visited the wife of that fool Wallace and spent midnight till dawn bouncing her from one end of the mattress to the other.

A nation's not a child, for God's sake. ... It's like a wild horse you tame by breaking it. Or a fiery woman you slap till she sees sense and warms your bed.

In 2014, the American media exploded with news of ISIS beheadings in Syria—six thousand miles away from the United States. Meanwhile, the beheading capital of the world is just to our south, a stone’s throw from American homes, businesses, and ranches. When the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria first began posting videotaped beheadings online, it was as if no one had ever heard of such barbarity. In fact, decapitation porn was an innovation of the Mexican drug cartels.45 One “ISIS” video circulating in 2014 showed a man being beheaded with a chain saw. Then it turned out the video wasn’t an ISIS beheading, at all: It was a Mexican video from 2010.46 After American David Hartley was shot and killed by Mexican drug cartel members while jet skiing with his wife at a lake on the Mexican border, the lead investigator on the case was murdered and his head delivered in a suitcase to a nearby military installation.47 In 2013, there was a huge outcry over Facebook’s video-sharing policy when an extremely graphic video of a man beheading a woman appeared on the site. That, too, was a product of Mexico.48 Where is the 24-7 coverage for these champion beheaders? If it seems like you never hear about all the dismemberments in Mexico, you’d be right. In a search of all transcripts in the Nexis archive in the first eight months of ISIS’s existence as a jihadist group, “beheading” was used in the same sentence as “ISIS” or “ISIL” 1,629 times. During that same time period, it was used in the same sentence as “Mexico” or “Mexican” twice. Indeed, in the previous five years Mexican beheadings were mentioned only sixty-six times.49 If a tree falls and beheads a woman in Mexico, does anyone hear it?

Sir David Evans was a charming old man with philosophic pretensions and a mass of white hair. Because of the philosophy he sat in front of the immense bookcases groaning under Locke, Hartley and Hume; and because of the hair these sages were cased in a dark shiny leather sparsely tooled in gold. The effect was charming – the more so in that Sir David's features invariably suggested rugged benevolence. Every few years a portrait of Sir David robed in scarlet and black and with Locke and Hume behind him would appear in the exhibitions which our greatest painters arrange at Burlington House. Of these portraits one already hung in the Great Hall of the university, a second could be seen in a dominating position as soon as one entered Sir David's villa residence, and a third was stowed away ready for offer to the National Portrait Gallery when the time came.

If there was any politician in America who reflected the Cold War and what it did to the country, it was Richard Nixon—the man and the era were made for each other. The anger and resentment that were a critical part of his temperament were not unlike the tensions running through the nation as its new anxieties grew. He himself seized on the anti-Communist issue earlier and more tenaciously than any other centrist politician in the country. In fact that was why he had been put on the ticket in the first place. His first congressional race in 1946, against a pleasant liberal incumbent named Jerry Voorhis, was marked by red-baiting so savage that it took Voorhis completely by surprise. Upon getting elected, Nixon wasted no time in asking for membership in the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was the committee member who first spotted the contradictions in Hiss’s seemingly impeccable case; in later years he was inclined to think of the case as one of his greatest victories, in which he had challenged and defeated a man who was not what he seemed, and represented the hated Eastern establishment. His career, though, was riddled with contradictions. Like many of his conservative colleagues, he had few reservations about implying that some fellow Americans, including perhaps the highest officials in the opposition party, were loyal to a hostile foreign power and willing to betray their fellow citizens. Yet by the end of his career, he became the man who opened the door to normalized relations with China (perhaps, thought some critics, he was the only politician in America who could do that without being attacked by Richard Nixon), and he was a pal of both the Soviet and Chinese Communist leadership. If he later surprised many long-standing critics with his trips to Moscow and Peking, he had shown his genuine diplomatic skills much earlier in the way he balanced the demands of the warring factions within his own party. He never asked to be well liked or popular; he asked only to be accepted. There were many Republicans who hated him, particularly in California. Earl Warren feuded with him for years. Even Bill Knowland, the state’s senior senator and an old-fashioned reactionary, despised him. At the 1952 convention, Knowland had remained loyal to Warren despite Nixon’s attempts to help Eisenhower in the California delegation. When Knowland was asked to give a nominating speech for Nixon, he was not pleased: “I have to nominate the dirty son of a bitch,” he told friends. Nixon bridged the gap because his politics were never about ideology: They were the politics of self. Never popular with either wing, he managed to negotiate a delicate position acceptable to both. He did not bring warmth or friendship to the task; when he made attempts at these, he was, more often than not, stilted and artificial. Instead, he offered a stark choice: If you don’t like me, find someone who is closer to your position and who is also likely to win. If he tilted to either side, it was because that side seemed a little stronger at the moment or seemed to present a more formidable candidate with whom he had to deal. A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.

Nixon bridged the gap because his politics were never about ideology: They were the politics of self. Never popular with either wing, he managed to negotiate a delicate position acceptable to both. He did not bring warmth or friendship to the task; when he made attempts at these, he was, more often than not, stilted and artificial. Instead, he offered a stark choice: If you don’t like me, find someone who is closer to your position and who is also likely to win. If he tilted to either side, it was because that side seemed a little stronger at the moment or seemed to present a more formidable candidate with whom he had to deal. A classic example of this came early in 1960, when he told Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican leader, that he would advocate a right-to-work plank at the convention; a few weeks later in a secret meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, the liberal Republican leader—then a more formidable national figure than Goldwater—Nixon not only reversed himself but agreed to call for its repeal under the Taft-Hartley act. “The man,” Goldwater noted of Nixon in his personal journal at the time, “is a two-fisted four-square liar.

On the eve of his departure, Franklin wrote two of his British friends to emphasize that America was determined to prevail. “If you flatter yourselves with beating us into submission, you know neither the people nor the country,” he told David Hartley. To Joseph Priestley, he provided a bit of math for one of their friends to ponder: “Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20,000 a head . . . During the same time, 60,000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expense necessary to kill us all.