Quotes by Historians - Page 16

The 20th Century proved that there is nothing more dangerous to the health of ethnic minority communities than big government.
A.E. Samaan
He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him.
Barbara W. Tuchman
Dominance can be a tempration to division. "There are so many of us, we can afford to fight amongst ourselves.
Richard Brookhiser
Riley had no doubt that an "immediate and merciful act of the Almighty" had saved them from the surf at Bojador. According to him, all of his men believed this too. Later, when a friend advised him to play down this conviction, because skeptics would use it to discredit the rest of his account of the voyage, Riley refused.
Dean King
The process of secularisation arises not from the loss of faith but from the loss of social interest in the world of faith. It begins the moment men feel that religion is irrelevant to the common way of life and that society as such has nothing to do with the truths of faith.
Christopher Henry Dawson
So time passed on. And the two skyscrapers decided to have a child. And they decided when their child came it should be a *free* child. "It must be a free child," they said to each other. "It must not be a child standing still all its life on a street corner. Yes, if we have a child she mist be free to run across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea. Yes, it must be a free child."So time passed on. Their child came. It was a railroad train, the Golden Spike Limited, the fastest long distance train in the Rootabaga Country. It ran across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea.
Carl Sandburg
And then the sword came down like a flash of lightning, and then her head was off her body and the long rivalry between me and the other Boleyn girl was over.
Philippa Gregory
Faith enables persons to be persons because it lets God be God.
Carter Lindberg
Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance.
Yuval Noah Harari
All work is seed sown. It grows and spreads and sows itself anew.
Thomas Carlyle
A live-in domestic worker: "You are never sure that your soul is your own except when you are out of the house.
H.W. Brands
As you travel around medieval England you will come across a sport described by some contemporaries as 'abominable ... more common, undignified and worthless than any other game, rarely ending but with some loss, accident or disadvantage to the players themselves'. This is football.
Ian Mortimer
The Jesus People experience proved to be a staging area for tens of thousands of young Americans who were making up their mind about marriage, schooling, and careers
Larry Eskridge
Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...
Wallace Stegner
We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time as a function of our own action.
J.D. Bernal
Awful momentum makes carrying through easier than calling off folly.
Barbara W. Tuchman
If a man wants his dreams to come true he must wake up.
Habeeb Akande
Forget the threat of Hell's infernal flames. The true torture would condemn a man to wait and wait and wait - for an eternity
Sharon Kay Penman
My best advice to writers is get yourself born in an interesting place.
Pierre Berton
Fear of failure prevents you from realising your dreams of success.
Habeeb Akande
If triangles had a God he would have three sides.
Baron de Montesquieu
Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing effect – the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on – these are mostly developments of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their roots might be in the activism of the ‘60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded.
Noam Chomsky
To know what has to be done then do it comprises the whole philosophy of practical life.
Sir William Osier
History is for human self-knowledge…the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
R.G. Collingwood
To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.
Rebecca Solnit
This organization (United Nations) is created to prevent you from going to hell. It isn't created to take you to heaven.
Henry Cabot Lodge
Pride in office without competence is as much a sin as competence without confidence.
Peter Tremayne
The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law.
H.G.Wells
It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.
Hilaire Belloc
I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
Michel Foucault
A dream business that doesn't make money is a living nightmare.
Habeeb Akande
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Henry Adams
Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily because the soul fires never burn brightly to begin with.
Joseph J. Ellis
Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher some spiritual hero.
Thomas Carlyle
He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, were all part of a filmy phantasmagoria that hung, scarcely veiling it, between him and a horrible real world. Then the Porroh man, thrusting his diabolical face through that curtain, was the one real and undeniable thing. At that he would get up and touch things, taste something, gnaw something, burn his hand with a match, or run a needle into himself.("Pollock And The Porrah Man")
H.G.Wells
I also hold very strong personal convictions about censorship. I don't believe in forbidden knowledge.
Andrea Cremer
The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it's a temporary and local place...
Rebecca Solnit
Koch believed that what the famed economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction" was so critical to the health of the capitalist system that empathy was an obstacle to acceptance of the world that must be brought into being.
Nancy MacLean
Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.
Jacob Bronowski
The sacralization of the party opened the way to the sacralization of Stalin when he became the supreme leader. After 1929, the political religion of Russia mainly concentrated on the deification of Stalin, who until his death in 1953 dominated the party and Soviet system like a tyrannical and merciless deity.
Emilio Gentile
You can get to oppression through regulation, especially in an "Idea Economy" which necessitates liberty of the mind to explore.
A.E. Samaan
What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing--permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.
Howard Zinn
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.
Jill Lepore
The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony.
Barbara W. Tuchman
Few are they who have never had the chance to achieve happiness ... and fewer those who have taken that chance.
André Maurois
Freedom or prison--what's the difference? A man must develop unwavering will power subject only to his reason.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You have dwelt overmuch upon pain. Pain is a swift distress; it ends and is forgotten. Without memory and fear pain is nothing, a contradiction to be heeded, a warning to be taken. Without pain what would life become? Pain is the master only of craven men. It is in man's power to rule it.
H.G.Wells
If the mystery can be reduced to one solution, it lies in a simple coincidence: Rimbaud's interest in his own work had survived the realization that the world would not be changed by verbal innovation. It did not survive the failure of all his adult relationships. He had always treated poems as a form of private communication. He gave his songs to chansonniers, his satires to satirists. Without a constant companion, he was writing in a void.
Graham Robb
The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private property.
Karl Marx
Never mind your happiness do your duty.
Will Durant
Within Easy Company they had made the best friends they had ever had, or would ever have. They were prepared to die for each other; more important, they were prepared to kill for each other.
Stephen E. Ambrose
Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of custom: but of all these perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous by simple repetition ceases to be miraculous.
Thomas Carlyle
There is enough dough in the world to make bread for us all to eat together.
Habeeb Akande
The child is more individualised than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent. In each case, it is towards the first of these pairs that all the individualising mechanisms are turned in our civilisation and when one wishes to individualise the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing
Michel Foucault
It is extremely difficult to obtain a hearing from men living in democracies, unless it be to speak to them of themselves. They do not attend to the things said to them, because they are always fully engrossed with the things they are doing. For indeed few men are idle in democratic nations; life is passed in the midst of noise and excitement, and men are so engaged in acting that little remains to them for thinking. I would especially remark that they are not only employed, but that they are passionately devoted to their employments. They are always in action, and each of their actions absorbs their faculties: the zeal which they display in business puts out the enthusiasm they might otherwise entertain for idea.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Both sides had more confidence in their opponents' weaknesses than their own strength.
H.W. Brands
Julian recognized that the strength of the orthodox Church rested to a great extent on the imperial discrimination in its favour. According to Ammianus, he tried to atomize the Church by ending the system:
Paul Johnson
The God who impoverished himself is also the God of abundance, and somehow, perhaps at times nonsensically, Christians are called to live out of an ethic not of scarcity but of abundance—an abundance that extends both to the homeless neighbor and to the artist neighbor. . .
Lauren Winner
It was a cultural revolution, and was not directed at instituting economic changes. He could thus appeal to old prejudices without threatening the existing economic system. This appealed, above all, to white-collar workers and the small entrepreneurs, as some of the statistics presented in this book will demonstrate. It was their kind of revolution: the ideology would give them a new status, free them from isolation in the industrial society, and give them a purpose in life. But it would not threaten any of their vested interests; indeed it would reinforce their bourgeois predilections toward family...and restore the 'good old values' which had been so sadly dismantled by modernity.
George L. Mosse
Greatness in the last analysis is largely bravery-courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards.
James Harvey Robinson