Egypt Memorable Quotes

In six years, Hoover circled the globe five times. He lived through the Boxer Rebellion in China, hacked through the jungles of Borneo, rode camels across the red emptiness of Western Australia, rubbed shoulders with Wyatt Earp and Jack London in a Klondike saloon, camped beside the Great Pyramids of Egypt. He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them. In

which Varo distinguished unto Incognit and fabulous, preceding the historical, and we should shortly have as wretched narratives of the first persons and actions in this land, as Justin gives of the Jews, when he makes Moses the son of their Joseph, and the sixth of their kings, or when he makes them expelled from Egypt, because the gods would not otherwise allay a plague that raged there; or such as are given by Pliny, when he makes Moses a magician; or Strabo, that makes him an Egyptian priest; if no speedy care be taken to preserve the memorables of our first settlement;

Both men practically fell all over themselves to agree. She felt a stab of guilt. Part of what she’d just said was a lie. But hardly a damnable one. In fact, she’d read the entirety of his journals—thirty-five volumes from a lifetime of expeditions to Egypt—in a single day’s time. And she’d memorized every word. These were talents afforded her by the same elixir that had changed the color of her eyes to blue, that ensured her tangle of brown curls remained the same length and the same shining luster. That made her flesh and bones all but indestructible. That had given her the gift of eternal life.

On 2 November 1917, five weeks before Allenby walked through the Jaffa Gate, the government in London had issued a document that was to have a fateful and lasting impact on the Holy Land, the Middle East and the world. The foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, wrote to Lord Rothschild, representing the World Zionist Organization, to inform him that: His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. The sixty-seven typewritten words of the Balfour Declaration combined considerations of imperial planning, wartime propaganda, biblical resonances and a colonial mindset, as well as evident sympathy for the Zionist idea. With them, as the writer Arthur Koestler was to quip memorably – neatly encapsulating the attendant and continuing controversy – ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’.8 Lloyd George highlighted sympathy for the Jews as his principal motivation. But the decisive calculations were political, primarily the wish to outsmart the French in post-war arrangements in the Levant9 and the impulse to use Palestine’s strategic location – its ‘fatal geography’ – to protect Egypt, the Suez Canal and the route to India.10 Other judgements have placed greater emphasis on the need to mobilize Jewish public opinion behind the then flagging Allied war effort. As Balfour told the war cabinet at its final discussion of the issue on 31 October: ‘If we could make a declaration favourable to such an ideal [Zionism], we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and in America.’11 Historians have spent decades debating the connections and contradictions between Balfour’s public pledge to the Zionists, the secret 1916 Sykes–Picot agreement between Britain, France and Russia about post-war spheres of influence in the Middle East, and pledges about Arab independence made by the British in 1915 to encourage Sharif Hussein of Mecca to launch his ‘revolt in the desert’ against the Turks. The truth, buried in imprecise definitions, misunderstandings and duplicity, remains elusive.