E. Cobham Brewer famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Tree of Liberty: A tree set up by the people, hung with flags and devices, and crowned with a cap of liberty. The Americans of the United States planted poplars and other trees during the war of independence, "as symbols of growing freedom." The Jacobins in Paris planted their first tree of liberty in 1790. The symbols used in France to decorate their trees of liberty were tricoloured ribbons, circles to indicate unity, triangles to signify equality, and a cap of liberty. Trees of liberty were planted by the Italians in the revolution of 1848.
-- E. Cobham Brewer

#War #Circles #Paris
The elephant which supports the world is called Muha-pudma, and the the tortoise which supports the elephant is called Chukwa. In some of the Eastern mythologies we are told that the world stands on the backs of eight elephants, called Achtequed-jams.
-- E. Cobham Brewer

#Elephants #Eight #Support
To defer anything to the Greek Calends is to defer it sine die. There were no calends in the Greek months. The Romans used to pay rents, taxes, bills, etc., on the calends, and to defer paying them to the â€œGreek Calendsâ€ was virtually to repudiate them. (See NEVER.)
-- E. Cobham Brewer

#Greek #Pay #Bills

A broadsheet obituarist once pointed out to me that veteran soldiers die by rank. First to go are the generals, admirals and air marshals, then the brigadiers, then a bit of a gap and the colonels and wing commanders and passed-over majors, then a steady trickle of captains and lieutenants. As they get older and rarer, so the soldiers are mythologised and grow ever more heroic, until finally drummer boys and under-age privates are venerated and laurelled with honours like ancient field marshals. There is something touching about that.
No war is inevitable until it breaks out.
The God of Battles will throw the dice that decide...
Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914.
This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.
Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.
Nothing is more limiting than a closed circle of acquaintanceship where every avenue of conversation has been explored and social exchanges are fixed in a known routine.
I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q...
There's enough people that do unfunny music. I'll leave the serious stuff to Paris Hilton and Kevin Federline.
Prior to his takeover of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini was camping near Paris, giving daily news conferences to a fawning international press corps without a murmur of complaint to France from the United States about the disaster it was coddling in the incredibly naive liberal belief that this extremist cleric would be an improvement over the Shah.

E. Cobham Brewer famous quotes

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