Aleksandar Hemon Quotes


When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism.


Citations

Hemon, Aleksandar. The Book of My Lives. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

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At the beginning of July, 1826 Adams, deathly ill, was asked to propose a toast to be given in his name for the coming July 4 celebrations. It was:. On his deathbed four days later he was aroused by the firing of cannon. When told it was Independence Day he murmured:


He had been King of Portugal and then had come to the Portuguese colony of Brazil where he led a revolution against Portugal, declared independence from the “mother country, and was elected as Emperor of Brazil. The Colony was much larger and richer in natural resources than the “mother country.”


He particularly had difficulty with the Pope and whose authority was supposed to be dominant in Europe. King Henry left the Catholic Church and made Protestantism the official English Church. It has been such ever since—all the result of a power struggle between two men.


He was a poor governor in general and was fired and replaced by the Dutch East India Company which was a happy occurrence for the colonists. The company was a money making institution and depended on colonists who would farm, trade and manufacture. If they were unhappy, the company would not profit. They would not have minded a tyrant if he could produce profits as some did in the Dutch East Indies, but Kieft was a loser on all counts.


3rd Viscount Palmerston. Lajos Kossuth was the Hungarian leader of anti-monarchists who were agitating for a Parliament. While many English people sympathized with Kossuth, his government, which had good relations with England, did not want any of the other European Governments to officially meet with him. It was considered insulting to a government if a friendly government met officially with a politician who was not approved by his own government. Palmerston, as Temple was referred to, wanted to show English sympathy with the reforms advocated by Kossuth. He was then the Foreign Minister and wanted to invite Kossuth to the Foreign Ministry. However the Cabinet had a meeting and voted against the idea which would not only inflame the Hungarian government, but would outrage all the other countries in Europe for this diplomatic insult. Palmerston then decided that he would meet with Kossuth in his private residence. When the Prime Minister discovered this plan, he sent a note by messenger telling Palmerston that he was the Foreign Minister and inviting Kossuth to his home could not be seen as an official action. Palmerston has his own political base and had enough supporters in Parliament that if he would be fired, he could bring down the coalition government. So in effect he told his Prime Minister off and dared Russell to fire Palmerston. Then he went ahead with the meeting. The cabinet was upset, Queen Victoria was outraged (she never cared for Palmerson as a Foreign Minister), the Newspapers had a field day, and all the European counties complained vehemently to the Queen and the Prime Minister. But Russell didn’t dare fire Palmerston at that point. However, with Queen Victoria’s shrewd political maneuvering and Russell coalescing support, he was able to demote Palmerson to Home Secretary and assume the Foreign Ministry himself in 1952. However, Palmerston had the final winning hand, when 3 years later, he was elected Prime Minister and he and the Queen had to make a rapprochement.


Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemon
  • Born: September 9, 1964
  • Nationality: Bosnian, American
  • Profession: Writer

Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American fiction writer, essayist, and critic. His best known novels are Nowhere Man (2002) and The Lazarus Project (2008).