Quotes by Historians - Page 29

They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil?
W.E.B. Du Bois
Rather than signalling the aspiration for system of checks and balances against absolute power, democracy become a euphemism for majority rule.
Peter Mansfield
Emotion as well as reason belongs to the very stuff of history.
Beryl Smalley
Israel's monomaniacal Spinoza worship is amusing and exasperating by turns. For a start, his insistence that Spinoza was the singular font of the Enlightenment leaves him without a story of the Enlightenment's intellectual or cultural origins. Every historian has to begin somewhere, but the fact that Israel begins with Spinoza, and then reduces most of what follows the philosopher to a footnote, leaves his account of the Enlightenment founded on something like immaculate conception.
Samuel Moyn
And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career.
H.G.Wells
If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say "Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history
Will Durant
When John Quincy Adams in the Netherlands was placed with elementary students and belittled because he did not speak Dutch, either the author or John Adams accuses school authorities of "littleness of soul".
Paul C. Nagel
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
Rebecca Solnit
Thomas Wollaston, in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, complained that Darwin did no seem to know what a species actually was. The British Quarterly, deliberately sitting up trouble, speculated that a time might come when a monkey could propose marriage to a genteel British lady. Perhaps cruelest of all was a cartoon in Punch magazine, depicting a gorilla with a sign on its neck. Deliberately evoking the anti-slavery tract of Darwin's Wedgwood forbears, the sign read:"Am I a Man and a Brother?
Jonathan Clements
We're going' Anne said firmly. So soon?' Percy pleaded. 'But stars come out at night.'Then they fade at dawn', Anne replied. 'This star needs to veil herself in darkness.
Philippa Gregory
If my phrases shock the reader, that only shows it is high time he or she was shocked.
H.G.Wells
The problem with you middle-class gay guys is, you pass for white. You move to the metropolitan gay centres, and you're more or less closeted--"private", you'd call it--when you step outside the ghetto. You assimilate yourselves, and suddenly you've got property to protect and money invested. I ask you, what impelled the militants of the civil rights movement of the sixties? You know what impelled them? They had nothing to lose. That's how they could brave the police dogs and the fire hoses. Even torture and death. Could you have done that?
Ethan Mordden
History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.
Edward Hallett Carr
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a steppingstone in the path of the strong.
Thomas Carlyle
It is an axiom of modern social psychology that the stories that tend to get repeated are the ones that somehow have the potential to strengthen the communities in which they are told, or to enhance the relationship between the teller and the hearer. This principle seems to be reflected in the stories that were handed down from the community around Jesus. Again and again, early Christian stories suggest that virtue is not enough. The lives of families and communities can only really flourish where virtue takes second place to love.
Kate Cooper
How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow s hall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure, -- is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?
W.E.B. Du Bois
Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
This is what I feared would come; this is what I have dreaded. It is not very bright and honorable as you have always thought it; it is not like a ballad. It is a muddle and a mess, and a sinful waste, and good men have died and more will follow.
Philippa Gregory
On the face of it, no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawingrooms into the manifold horrors of the First World War.
Lyn Macdonald
Sometimes, the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.
Diane Ravitch
It is always darkest just before .the day dawneth.
Thomas Fuller
When Andrew Jackson died someone asked a friend if he thought Old Hickory would go to heaven. 'He will if he wants to ' was the reply. On his death bed Disraeli declined a visit from Queen Victoria. 'No it is better not' he said 'she would only ask me to take a message to Albert.' I am a broken machine. I am ready to go.
Woodrow Wilson
Tyrants are obvious, and easy to identify. It is the well entrenched and corrupt establishment that is truly insidious.
A.E. Samaan
But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.
Eric Hobsbawm
Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.
Stefan Collini
The claim at the heart of this book has been carefully researched by several generations of scholars and is orthodox in academic circles, if not beyond. Christians under the Roman Empire were neither constantly persecuted nor martyred in huge numbers for their faith. They were prosecuted from time to time for alleged sedition, holding illegal meetings or refusing to sacrifice to the emperor. They were, like other convicts, sometimes tortured and executed in horrible ways. They seem to have been regarded by many Romans with distaste as a particularly silly superstition. But Christian stories of thousands of individual and mass martyrdoms over centuries have at best a limited basis in historical fact, and in many cases are sheer fiction.
Teresa Morgan
He that's cheated twice by the same man is an accomplice with the cheater.
Thomas Fuller
We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.
James Gleick
Some minds seem almost to create themselves springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles.
Washington Irving
In the seventh century the Arabs created a new world into which other peoples were drawn. In the nineteenth and twentieth, they were themselves drawn into a new world created in western Europe.
Albert Hourani
Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities such as More Bacon Grotius Pascal Cromwell Bossuet Montesquieu Jefferson Napoleon Pitt etc. They would be an Encyclopedia of Errors.
Lord Acton
Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of our 100,000 generations. We have done it all sleepwalking. Nature let a few apes into the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of ingredients and processes. The effect on us and the world has accumulated ever since. Let’s list a few steps between the earliest times and this: sharp stones, animal skins, useful bits of bone and wood, wild fire, tame fire, seeds for eating, seeds for planting, houses, villages, pottery, cities, metals, wheels, explosives. What strikes one most forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of change - or to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.
Ronald Wright
Yes, I know this narrative is crowded with beautiful women - Mrs. Pearson, Mrs. Maycott, Mrs. Lavien, Mrs. Bingham. We might form a cricket team of beautiful women. I cannot help it if they are the ones who excite my notice and so trouble myself to describe.
David Liss
I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church.
Margaret George
Now even reformers needed political machines.
Rick Perlstein
His saying was: live and let live.
Friedrich von Schiller
There are moment of sadness and moment of joy. This is life.
Beth Cohen
They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.
Howard Zinn
Mr. Polly went into the National School at six and he left the private school at fourteen, and by that time his mind was in much the same state that you would be in, dear reader, if you were operated upon for appendicitis by a well-meaning, boldly enterprising, but rather over-worked and under-paid butcher boy, who was superseded towards the climax of the operation by a left-handed clerk of high principles but intemperate habits,—that is to say, it was in a thorough mess.
H.G.Wells
War is the science of destruction.
John S.C. Abbott
Eisenhower on Patton: "Fundamentally, he is so avid for recognition as a great commander that he won't with ruthlessly suppress any habit that will jeopardize it.
Jean Edward Smith
I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.
Howard Zinn
Don’t stop writing until someone pries the pen from your cold, dead hands.
James John Tritten
European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation.
Alfred W. Crosby
Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.
Michel Foucault
You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge one for yourself.
James A. Froude
He had no desire to grandstand for his country or himself.
John Taliaferro
He must become an apprentice to ordinary life.
Paul C. Nagel
No gods or demons would stop him in his quest of being reunited with her.
Alan Kinross
For it is just this question of pain that partsus. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your ownpains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions aboutsin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurelywhat an animal feels.
H.G.Wells
For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?
Michel Foucault
A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.
Philippe Ariès
Any preference for my group's interests over yours must be justified by some unbiased, disinterested ethic. Which sounds simple but, given that we're dealing with Humans and not Vulcans, it's sometimes difficult for two parties to agree on basic principles, specially parties who are unable or unwilling to switch points of view. This is the power of ethical reasoning.
Michael Shermer
...but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.
Will Durant
The world's oldest university, University of Karaouin, was established by a Muslim woman in Fez, Morocco in 859
Firas Alkhateeb
Evolution provides a scientific foundation for the core values shared by most Christians and conservatives, and by accepting–and embracing–the theory of evolution, Christians and conservatives strengthen their religion, their politics, and science itself. The conflict between science and religion is senseless. It is based on fears and misunderstandings rather than on facts and moral wisdom. (138)
Michael Shermer
And when we describe it as I shall do, it becomes plain that imagination is a specifically human gift. To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.
Jacob Bronowski
In Martin Luther's life and behavior is very courteous and friendly, and there is nothing of the stern stoic or grumpy fellow about him. He can adjust to all occasions. In social gathering he is gay, witty, ever full of joy, always has a bright and happy face, no matter how seriously his adversaries threatening him. One can see that God's strength is within him. – Petrus Mosellanus
Andrew Pettegree