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- The tribe, despised for its cannibalism, became extinct, unnoticed and unlamented by either the whites or other Amerindians.
T.R. Fehrenbach,
Comanches: The History of a People
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- "Who knows," says Euripides, "if life is not death, and death life?" Plato in one of his dialogues puts these words into the mouth of Socrates, the wisest of men, the very man who created the theory of general ideas and first considered the clarity and distinctness of our judgments to be an index of their truth. According to Plato, Socrates almost always when death is discussed says the same, or much the same as Euripides- No one knows whether life is not death and death life. Since the earliest days the wisest of men have lived in this state of mystified ignorance; only common men know quite distinctly what life is, and what death.
How has it happened, how could it happen, that the wisest are in doubt where the ordinary man can see no difficulty whatsoever, and why are the most painful and terrible difficulties always reserved for the wisest? For what can be more terrible than not to know whether one is alive or dead?
Lev Shestov,
In Job's Balances: On the Sources of the Eternal Truths
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- The Mexic people believed that the sun would not rise unless the gods were fed with smoking human hearts, and the corn would not grow unless the fields were sprayed with symbolic human blood. Thus Moctezuma the Younger sent wizards out against Cortes when he had hundreds of battalions at his command. Most Amerindians substituted human will- medicine or magic- for rational observation and reaction. Moctezuma read doom in oracles, and other valiant men rode into battle believing that cosmic forces would turn bullets from their breasts. When all failed, they blamed their magic, refusing to the last to accept the tyranny of cause and effect over human dreams and hopes. Such men, always bewildered in the world, ride the crest of exultant, exuberant, magical luck or divine favor, or, thwarted, sink into a manic-depressive abyss. They do not fail; the spirits turn against them.
T.R. Fehrenbach,
Comanches: The History of a People
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- From the Latin pollice truncato, deprived of the thumb; it having been a common practice among the Romans to cut off a thumb to avoid serving in the wars. Hence our word poltroon for a coward.
Eliezer Edwards,
Dictionary of Words, Facts, and Phrases (1901)
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