Just pulling a sentence or two from Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography. This struck me as interesting, and may be for you bibliophiles out there too:
Teddy: "Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover's besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls 'the mad pride of intellectuality,' taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books.... Now and then I am asked as to 'what books a statesman should read,' and my answer is, poetry and novels — including short stories under the head of novels... He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse. Gibbon and Macaulay, Herootus, Thucydides and Tacitus, the Heimskringla, Froissart, Joinville and Villehardouin, Parkman and Mahan [where Teddy got his idea for the Great White Fleet], Mommsen and Rank... [and] Darwin and Huxley and Carlyle and Emerson, and parts of Kant, and of volumes like Sutherland's 'Growth of the Moral Instinct,' or [Lord] Acton's Essays and Lounsbury's studies..."
Excerpt taken from chapter IX entitled, "Outdoors and Indoors"
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2 comments:
Groucho Marx: Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
That's a good one too, JJ, although I would never join any orginazation that would have me (G. Marx as well, paraphrased; I'm certain you'd recognize it).
I'd definitely recommend T. Roosevelt's autobiography for a long flight or something. Pepe would like it because Teddy was crucial during the formative years of American Imperialism on the international scale (he'd go on and on about the Great White Fleet, or something of that order). Teddy wasn't a pussy.
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