Quotes by Historians - Page 27

What was it like to live amidst such machines, to be familiar with them, to have them shape one's earliest intuitions about machinery: how it works, what it does, how it compares to living creatures?
Jessica Riskin
The government is an artificial creation, established by the people to defend everyone's equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And when the government does not fulfill that obligation, it is the right of the people, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, to 'alter or abolish' the government.
Howard Zinn
Major Trapp was never there. Instead he remained in Jozefow because he allegedly could not bear the sight. We men were upset about that and said we couldn't bear the sight either." Indeed, Trapp's distress was a secret to no one. At the marketplace one policeman remembered hearing Trapp say, "Oh God, why did I have to be given these orders," as he put his hand on his heart. Another policeman witnessed him at the schoolhouse. "Today, I can still see exactly before my eyes Major Trapp there in the room pacing back and forth with his hands behind his back. He said something like, 'Man, ... such jobs don't suit me. But orders are orders.' " Another man remembered vividly "how Trapp, finally alone in our room, sat on a stool and wept bitterly. The tears really flowed." Another also witnessed Trapp at his headquarters. "Major Trapp ran around excitedly and then suddenly stopped dead in front of me, stared and asked if I agreed with this. I looked him straight in the eye and said 'No, Herr Major!' He then began to run around again and wept like a child." The doctor's aide encountered Trapp weeping on the path from the marketplace to the forest and asked if he could help. "He answered me only to the effect that everything was very terrible." Concerning Jozefow, Trapp later confined to his driver, "If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth, then have mercy on us Germans.
Christopher R. Browning
Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son into the colonial colleges.
Louis B. Wright
So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we can imagine.
Yuval Noah Harari
If you're independent-minded in school, you're probably going to get in trouble very early on. That's not the trait that's being preferred or cultivated.
Noam Chomsky
Talent for oratory can simulate the need for action and even thought.
Barbara W. Tuchman
During the day, memories could be held at bay, but at night, dreams became the devil's own accomplices.
Sharon Kay Penman
How easy is it for one benevolent being to diffuse pleasure around him, and how truly is a kind heart a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity to freshen into smiles.
Washington Irving
[Patriotism] is in itself a kind of religion: it does not reason, but it acts from the impulse of faith and sentiment.
Alexis de Tocqueville
It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for... Flat expanses would call to me... These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor...
Rebecca Solnit
The towering genius is not apolitical.
Richard Brookhiser
The word 'algebra' derives from Al-Khawarizmi's book title "al-jabr", meaning "completion"; balancing both sides to find a solution
Firas Alkhateeb
The local liberal press, much molested by the censorship, had its courageous and skilful writers such as VM Doroshevich, the master of that semi-literary and semi-journalistic essay at which Bronstein himself was one day to excel.
Isaac Deutscher
I think maybe the classic formulation was by David Hume in "Of the First Principles of Government," where he pointed out that "Force is always on the side of the governed." Whether it's a military society, a partially free society, or what we - not he - would call a totalitarian state, it's the governed who have the power. And the rulers have to find ways to keep them from using their power. Force has its limits, so they have to use persuasion. They have to somehow find ways to convince people to accept authority. If they aren't able to do that, the whole thing is going to collapse.
Noam Chomsky
As much as Jefferson loved France residence abroad gave him greater appreciation for his own nation. He was a tireless advocate for things American while abroad, and a promoter of things European while at home. Moving between two worlds, translating the best of the old into the new and explaining the benefits of the new to the old, he created a role for himself as both intermediary and arbiter.
Jon Meacham
Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.
Henry Thomas Buckle
Only a small crack ... but cracks make caves collapse.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds.
Rebecca Solnit
The kingdom of Aragon possessed an official known as the Justicia, for whom no exact equivalent is to be found in any country of western Europe. An Aragonese noble appointed by the Crown, the Justicia was appointed to see that the laws of the land were not infringed by royal or baronial officials, and that the subject was protected against any exercise of arbitrary power. The office of Justicia by no means worked perfectly, and by the late fifteenth century it was coming to be regarded as virtually hereditary in the family of Lanuza, which had close ties with the Crown; but none the less, the...
J.H. Elliott
Government is nothing more than the combined force of society or the united power of the multitude for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people... There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all the others by size or figure or beauty and variety of colors in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favor, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike... The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation it is impossible they should be enslaved. Ambition is one of the more ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable... There is a danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living wth power to endanger public liberty.
David McCullough
If it were not for hopes the heart would break.
Thomas Fuller
But by this time I was acutely conscious of the gap between law and justice. I knew that the letter of the law was not as important as who held the power in any real-life situation.
Howard Zinn
History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
Alexis de Tocqueville
We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides.
Adam Nicolson
That which is bitter to endure may be sweet to remember.
Thomas Fuller
[T]he radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, "The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational capitalism.
Rebecca Solnit
Deploring change is the unchangeable habit of all Englishmen. If you find any important figures who really like change such as Bernard Shaw Keir Hardie Lloyd George Selfridge or Disraeli you will find that they are not really English at all but Irish Scotch Welsh American or Jewish. Englishmen make changes sometimes great changes. But secretly or openly they always deplore them.
Raymond Postgate
Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It was an attempt to express their inner significance or to draw attention to realities that were too elusive to be discussed in a logically coherent way.
Karen Armstrong
Forgetting of a wrong is a mild revenge.
Thomas Fuller
...the Men Who Knew came out of the woodwork.
Rebecca Solnit
...a more open and honest appraisal of the true nature of Silicon Valley and its opportunities as well as the many problems.
David Welch
It is not science which leads to unbelief but rather ignorance. The ignorant man thinks he understands something provided that he sees it every day. The natural philosopher walks amid enigmas, always striving to understand and always half-understanding. He learns to believe what he does not understand, and that is a step on the road to faith.
Jan Potocki
Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge.
Friedrich Schiller
Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us.
Robert Byron
Cronkite is not a genius at anything except being straight, honest, and normal.
Douglas Brinkley
All I know is I'm not a Marxist.
Karl Marx
[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)
Karen Armstrong
Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture “advances”, this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, … this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes, traits and symbols - like and consistent amongst themselves - belongs most definitely not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the springtimes of great Cultures. Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found. There - it must be.
Oswald Spengler
The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible, but against their ideas of perfection...
Rebecca Solnit
It is a great gift when God gives me a stirring, a feeling, a something-at-all in prayer. But work is being done whether I feel it or not.
Lauren F. Winner
Powerlessness is such a lure, such a poisonous lure.
Carolyn Ives Gilman
Rather, when famine, plague or war break out of our control, we feel that somebody must have screwed up, we set up a commission of inquiry, and promise ourselves that next time we’ll do better.
Yuval Noah Harari
I have read in some of the old histories that in early times the Greeks did not know how to write until two men, one of whom was called Cadmus (Qatmus) and the other Aghanūn, came from Egypt bringing sixteen letters with which the Greeks wrote. Then one of these two men derived four other letters, also used for writing. Later, another man named Simonides (Simūnidus) derived four additional ones, making twenty-four. It was in those days that Socrates (Suqrātīs) appeared
Ibn Al-Nadim
Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its own reward, because it is focused on the only One whose recognition is important, the One before whom all hearts are open.
Mark A. Noll
Pride had rather go out of the way than go behind.
Thomas Fuller
A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a thoughtful adage) religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the grave. In the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and softens the nature of things, and gives men courage to bear pain and hardship patiently; at every step the gods are with them, and will not let them perish, until they do. Even then a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it. If victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows; the life of the body gives way, in the dominant classes, to the life of the senses and the mind; toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude. At last men begin to doubt the gods; they mourn the tragedy of knowledge, and seek refuge in every passing delight. Achilles is at the beginning, Epicurus at the end. After David comes Job, and after Job, Ecclesiastes.
Will Durant
They are girls to whom things happen, and they take it hard. But I bear myself as more than a silly girl. I am the daughter of a water goddess. I am a woman with water in her veins and power in her breeding. I am a woman who makes things happen, and I am not defeated yet. I am not defeated by a boy with a newly won crown, and no man will ever walk away from me certain that he won’t walk back.
Philippa Gregory
Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.
Francis Parkman
Other nations merely change governments as a lady changes dancing partners: Canada contrives to fall in a dead faint every time the music stops.
Gordon Donaldson
The rifts in this ancient wall continue to be patched with exhortations to women to avoid challenging the norm even if it means faking orgasm and sacrificing honesty in their intimate relationships with men. In the past we have been willing to pay this price; whether we should continue to do so is question for individuals; not historians, to decide.
Rachel P. Maines
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
Noam Chomsky
If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of the dangers of feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. Most of us do, one way or another.
Rebecca Solnit
Our task over the next few generations is to transform the world of independent states in which we live into some sort of genuine international community. If we succeed in creating that community, however quarrelsome, discontented, and full of injustice it probably will be, then we shall effectively have abolished the ancient institution of warfare. Good riddance.
Gwynne Dyer
This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a time, also alone, but in communion with your imagination, traversing your route. Books are solitudes where we meet.
Rebecca Solnit
In any theological struggle, the first thousand years are always the bitterest.
Philip Jenkins
Many contemporary critics of higher education similarly posit a Golden Age but no one knows when it was supposed to exist.
Mark C. Carnes
Power is a poison well known for thousands of years. If only no one were ever to acquire material power over others! But to the human being who has faith in some force that holds dominion over all of us, and who is therefore conscious of his own limitations, power is not necessarily fatal. For those, however, who are unaware of any higher sphere, it is a deadly poison. For them there is no antidote.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The world’s myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.
René Girard
The world goes up and the world goes down And the sunshine follows the rain And yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown Can never come over again Sweet wife. No never come over again.
Charles Kingsley