Quotes by Historians - Page 23

The original language of Christianity is translation.
Lamin Sanneh
A bad peace is even worse than war.
Tacitus
Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller
But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp!
H.G.Wells
In America religion is the road to knowledge, and the observance of the divine laws leads man to civil freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville
It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don't need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.
Wallace Stegner
What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest.
Wallace Stegner
Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.
Noam Chomsky
The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.
Howard Zinn
By this time I was nolonger very much terrified or very miserable. I had, as it were, passed thelimit of terror and despair. I felt now that my life was practically lost,and that persuasion made me capable of daring anything
H.G.Wells
In the politics of the every day, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.
Timothy Snyder
In the midst of the apparent diversity of human affairs, a certain number of primary facts may be discovered, from which all others are derived.
Alexis de Tocqueville
If everyone followed through on their resolutions, the conseqences for humanity would be dire: The fast food industry would collapse, the gyms would become unbearably crowded, and lifestyle magazines would have nothing left to say.
Amanda Foreman
Yet it is also a tonic and an antidote to dullness to be with the Serbs. They possess the irresponsible gaiety that we traditionally connect with the Irish, with whom they have often been compared. Other less convenient sides of the Irish character are also typical in the Serbs, such as a cheerful contempt for punctuality in daily life and a ready willingness, arising clearly from politeness and good nature, to make promises that are not always fulfilled. But perhaps the most pronounced of these similarities is to be found in the songs of Serbia and Ireland. With both peoples the historic songs about the past are songs of sorrow, or noble struggles against overwhelming odds, of failure redeemed by unconquerable resolve. There is nothing strange in this combination of laughing gaiety and profound melancholy. It is often only those who are truly capable of the one emotion who also have the faculty for the other.
R.G.D. Laffan
The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke
Barbara W. Tuchman
Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.
Barbara W. Tuchman
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Thomas Carlyle
Goldwater's approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes.
Rick Perlstein
If you can walk you can dance. Zimbabwe saying Music is well said to be the speech of angels.
Thomas Carlyle
[The South's] obsession was to maintain a government, an economy, an arrangement of the sexes, a relationship of the races, and a social system that had never existed...except in the fertile imagination of those who would not confront either the reality that existed or the change that would bring them closer to reality.
John Hope Franklin
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains ... an unuprooted small corner of evil. (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The generation that followed did not have the same concerns; none of its members attempted to follow the example of the past generation. There was no longer anyone with the noble determination to get to know the great men of the world, or if there were some individuals consumed with this curiosity, they were few in number. From then on, there remained only vulgar minds given over to hatred, envy and discord, who took an interest only in things which did not concern them, gossip, slander, calumny of one's neighbors, all those things which are the source of the worst of our troubles.
Cheikh Anta Diop
But Khair did not need such proof of her husband's love for her. Over and over again,James had risked everything for her. Most relationships in life can survive - or not - without being put to any really crucial, fundamental test. It was James's fate for his love to be tested not once, but four times....At each stage he could easily have washed his hands off his teenage lover. Each time he chose to remain true to her.That, not the words of any will, was the evidence she could cling onto.
William Dalrymple
In history, as elsewhere, fools rush in, and the angels may perhaps be forgiven if rather than tread in those treacherous paths they tread upon the fools instead.
G.R. Elton
Established churches not infrequently formed an alliance with the aristocracy , joining arm in arm against change.
John Ferling
Theodore Roosevelt came to Dekota to experience the dying of one age with the slaying of a rare buffalo and the dawning of the West's industrial age.
H.W. Brands
When we get to Heaven, we can try a monarchy, perhaps." John Hay
John Taliaferro
Never base motivation or fear, entirely.
Peter Heather
I've learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing - though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. There's a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.
Rebecca Solnit
He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced.
Henry Adams
A man's worth can be judged through those who dislike him.
Bill Loguidice
Government is the right disposition of things.
Michel Foucault
I feel an army in my fist.
Friedrich Schiller
Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.
Paul Fussell
He had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success.
Barbara W. Tuchman
A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.
Jill Lepore
You know and we know, as practical men that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength and that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
Thucydides
It [predatory capitalism] is incapable of meeting human needs that can be expressed only in collective terms, and its concept of competitive man who seeks only to maximize wealth and power, who subjects himself to market relationships, to exploitation and external authority, is antihuman and intolerable in the deepest sense.
Noam Chomsky
From this we conclude, that, to live in harmony and peace…we must trace a line of distinction between those (assertions) that are capable of verification, and those that are not; (we must) separate by an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities.
Constantin-François Volney
Most principles are limp until they are tested.
Richard Brookhiser
History a distillation of rumor
Thomas Carlyle
A certain elementary training in statistical method is becoming as necessary for everyone living in this world of today as reading and writing.
H.G.Wells
I not only use all the brains I have but all I can borrow.
Woodrow Wilson
The construction of a new body of knowledge always bears direct connection to the ideology in which it operates. Historical insights that diverge from the narrative laid down at the inception of the nation can be accepted only when consternation about their implications is abated. This can happen when the current collective identity begins to be taken for granted and ceases to be something anxiously and nostalgically clings to a mythical past, when identity becomes the basis for living and not its purpose - that is when historiographic change can take place.
Shlomo Sand
The Constitution. . . illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the interests of a wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners, for middle-income mechanics and farmers, to build a broad base of support. The slightly prosperous people who make up this base of support are buffers against the blacks, the Indians, the very poor whites. They enable the elite to keep control with a minimum of coercion, a maximum of law--all made palatable by the fanfare of patriotism and unity.
Howard Zinn
Of all the things which man can do or make here below, by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books.
Thomas Carlyle
The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.
Ben Macintyre
We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity.
H.G.Wells
How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.
David Hume
What is difficult in training will become easy in a battle
Suvorov Alexander
Women are perfectly well aware that the more they seem to obey the more they rule.
Jules Michelet
Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
Piero Scaruffi
The health care bill is nothing about health care- it's about controlling the people.
David Lincoln
A man who accustoms himself to buy superfluities is often in want of necessities.
Hannah Farnham Lee
You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself one.
James A. Froude
Faint not, poor soul, in God still trust;Fear not the things thou suffer must;For, whom he loves he doth chastise, And then all tears wipes from their eyes.William BradfordPlymouth Colony Governor
Nathaniel Philbrick
Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary source for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves.
Robert Darnton
.....what happened to my little brother had to fit into my life, not consume or define it.
Leslie A. Gordon
He that fears not the future may enjoy the present.
Thomas Fuller
There is no witness so dreadful, no accuser so terrible as the conscience that dwells in the heart of every man.
Polybius