Lothamer Lansing Quotes

The rapidity with which one can completely change one's ideas ... and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful. ~ Alfred Lansing

Of all their enemies
the cold, the ice, the sea
he feared none more than demoralization. ~ Alfred Lansing

There is no man so low down that the cure for his condition does not lie strictly within himself. ~ Thomas Lansing Masson

I wanted to be that cranky old guy that stands on his porch and yells at the neighborhood kids. ~ Robert Lansing

Even at home, with theatres and all sorts of amusements, changes of scene and people, four months idleness would be tedious: One can then imagine how much worse it is for us. ~ Alfred Lansing

I have a great many opinions about writing, but I'm afraid that all of them are unprintable ~ Alfred Lansing

To feel themselves in the presence of true greatness many find it necessary only to be alone. ~ Thomas Lansing Masson

If you don't wake up with something in your stomach every day that makes you think, "I want to make this movie," it'll never get made. ~ Sherry Lansing

This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe - and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone. The ~ Alfred Lansing

Think of what would happen to us ... if there were no humorists; life would be one long Congressional Record. ~ Thomas Lansing Masson

No matter what the odds, a man does not pin his last hope for survival on something and then expect that it will fail. ~ Alfred Lansing

In some ways they had come to know themselves better. In this lonely world of ice and emptiness, they had achieved at least a limited kind of contentment. They had been tested and found not wanting. ~ Alfred Lansing

It must be a hard life to be the child of a psychologist. ~ Thomas Lansing Masson

You know, I don't mind dying. The thing that pisses me off is that I won't get to be an old man. I was looking forward to that. ~ Robert Lansing

I consider those actors who amaze me are somehow less attractive to me than those actors who move me. ~ Robert Lansing

The precision metallic ratcheting sound a Glock 9mm makes when a bullet is forced out of the gun's clip into the killing chamber is a universal sound that good guys and bad guys and wild animals alike understand on a primal level. - The Devil's Necktie ~ John Lansing

He promised to write a book later about the trip. He sold the rights to the motion pictures and still photographs that would be taken, and he agreed to give a long lecture series on his return. In all these arrangments, there was one basic assumption - that Shackleton would survive. ~ Alfred Lansing

The whole undertaking was criticized in some circles as being too "audacious." And perhaps it was. But if it hadn't been audacious, it wouldn't have been to Shackleton's liking. He was, above all, an explorer in the classic mold - utterly self-reliant, romantic, and just a little swashbuckling. ~ Alfred Lansing

I left Paramount at the ripe young age of sixty. A generation ago, that would have been retirement age. But my generation has more energy, more drive, and a greater life expectancy than any group of retirees before us. We are going to be here for two decades or more past 'retirement' age and we want to do something relevant in the so-called third act of our lives. ~ Sherry Lansing

They thought of home, naturally, but there was no burning desire to be in civilization for its own sake. Worsley recorded: "Waking on a fine morning I feel a great longing for the smell of dewy wet grass and flowers of a Spring morning in New Zealand or England. One has very few other longings for civilization - good bread and butter, Munich beer, Coromandel rock oysters, apple pie and Devonshire cream are pleasant reminiscences rather than longings. ~ Alfred Lansing

Shackleton's unwillingness to succumb to the demands of everyday life & his insatiable excitement w/ unrealistic ventures left him open to the accusation of being basically immature & irresponsible. & very possibly he was-by conventional standards. But the great leaders of historical record-the Napoleons, the Nelsons, the Alexanders-have rarely fitted any conventional mold, & it is perhaps an injustice to evaluate them in ordinary terms. There can be little doubt that Shackleton, in this way, was an extraordinary leader of men. ~ Alfred Lansing

In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. It is a return to the Ice Age - no warmth, no life, no movement. Only those who have experienced it can fully appreciate what it means to be without the sun day after day and week after week. Few men unaccustomed to it can fight off its effects altogether, and it has driven some men mad. ~ Alfred Lansing

During the day enough light filtered through the canvas roofing so that the men could make their way about, but long before dusk the hut grew much too dark to see anything. Marston and Hurley experimented and found that, by filling a small container with blubber oil and draping pieces of surgical bandage over the edge as a wick, they could obtain a feeble flame by which a man might read if he were not more than a few feet away. By such methods they gradually eliminated one little misery after another. ~ Alfred Lansing

It was only two months after Tunde, her ex-love interest, suddenly moved to North Carolina, against her wishes, when she met Amiel at a gas station in Lansing. ~ Jessica N. Watkins

The ship reacted to each fresh wave of pressure in a different way. Sometimes she simply quivered briefly as a human being might wince if seized by a single, stabbing pain. Other times she retched in a series of convulsive jerks accompanied by anguished outcries. On these occasions her three masts whipped violently back and forth as the rigging tightened like harpstrings. But most agonizing for the men were the times when she seemed a huge creature suffocating and gasping for breath, her sides heaving against the strangling pressure.

More than any other single impression in those final hours, all the men were struck, almost to the point of horror, by the way the ship behaved like a giant beast in its death agonies. ~ Alfred Lansing

Then he opened the Bible Queen Alexandra had given them and ripped out the flyleaf and the page containing the Twenty-third Psalm. He also tore out the page from the Book of Job with this verse on it:

Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone.
And the face of the deep is frozen.

The he laid the Bible in the snow and walked away.
It was a dramatic gesture, but that was the way Shackleton wanted it. From studying the outcome of past expeditions, he believed that those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed. ~ Alfred Lansing

Nor did the Antarctic represent to Shackleton merely the grubby means to a financial end. In a very real sense he needed it - something so enormous, so demanding, that it provided a touchstone for his monstrous ego and implacable drive. In ordinary situations, Shackleton's tremendous capacity for boldness and daring found almost nothing worthy of its pulling power; he was a Percheron draft horse harnessed to a child's wagon cart. But in the Antarctic - here was a burden which challenged every atom of his strength.

Thus, while Shackleton was undeniably out of place, even inept, in a great many everyday situations, he had a talent - a genius, even - that he shared with only a handful of men throughout history - genuine leadership. He was, as one of his men put it, "the greatest leader that ever came on God's earth, bar none. ~ Alfred Lansing

In 1916, President Wilson drafted the speech in which he declared, "It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be." His Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in the margin: "Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama."6 That ~ Os Guinness

But Zimmermann surprised him. On Friday, March 2, during a press conference, Zimmermann himself confirmed that he had sent the telegram. "By admitting the truth," Lansing wrote, "he blundered in a most astounding manner for a man engaged in international intrigue. Of course the message itself was a stupid piece of business, but admitting it was far worse. ~ Erik Larson