Hernan Cortes Quotes

“The priests are debarred from female society, nor is any woman permitted to enter the religious houses.”

“I love to travel, but hate to arrive.”

“Thus they have an idol that they petition for victory in war; another for success in their labors; and so for everything in which they seek or desire prosperity, they have their idols, which they honor and serve.”

“You knew I would find you and you knew what I'd do when I did." -Cort (The Carver's Problem)”

“He (William Cort) had some desire to be successful, but it did not burn so strongly in him that he was prepared to overcome his character to achieve it.”

“Anyone who writes is too precious to lose. ”

“But why was the room suddenly becoming so dark? It was the middle of the afternoon. With a supreme effort Giuseppe Corte, who felt himself paralyzed with a strange lethargy, looked at the clock on the nightstand beside the bed. It was 3:30. He turned his head in the other direction and saw that the shutters, in obedience to some mysterious command, were closing slowly, blocking the passage of light.”

“Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the late Robespierre; John Brown's lengthily underlined letters; Lenin's bottles of invisible ink; one of Di Giovanni's suitcases, with an iron cylinder of gelignite and two glass tubes of acid inside; the Constitution of the Ku Klux Klan; a bruised ear (Napoleon pinched it with loving condescension)... And dead bodies, of course. (They sing about John Brown's body.) Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history - the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. Sooner or later, every murder becomes quaint. Charlemagne hanged four and a half thousand "rebels" in a single day, but he has achieved a storybook benevolence. And that's only natural: historiography begins after the orange has been sucked,; the peeler believes in the "great and beautiful things," or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduced truth and counterfeit to the same greyness - caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain inexplicable. Rising up and rising down! And whom shall I save, and who is my enemy, and who is my neighbor?”

“The human species' foremost task and unshakable duty is survival.”

“I kicked, shouted an obscene word, got another faceful of goo for my troubles, and did the only thing left available to me. I started to laugh. This was a stupid way to die, all right. But also a god damned funny one.”