Quotes by Historians - Page 33

That's just like the manual says,' said Witherwax. "If we want to have international brotherhood, we gotta get a language that everybody understands all the time.''You mean with no homonyms?' said Doc Brenner.Mr. Gross belched again, and held up two fingers to indicate another Boilermaker. 'Are you saying that the language a fella speaks can make a fairy of him?' ("Gin Comes In Bottles")
Fletcher Pratt
Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education is not ‘broken.’ Public education is in a crisis only so far as society is and only so far as this new narrative of crisis has destabilized it.
Diane Ravitch
[While writing history], I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read other people's mail.
David McCullough
...it is crucial to realize that an once of student affairs administration prevention can stave off a pound of lawyers.
Peter F. Lake
If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.
Paul Fussell
It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.
Herodotus
The invention of the mechanical clock was one of a number of major advances that turned Europe from a weak, peripheral, highly vulnerable outpost of Mediterranean civilization into a hegemonic aggressor.
David S. Landes
Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East, far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hither-ward from the gray Dawn of Time! Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered. Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all Jo'tuns, Tailor-gods, Double-barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos whatsoever!
Thomas Carlyle
Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it.
Studs Terkel
I can pardon everybody's mistakes except my own.
Marcus Porcius Cato
It is always perilous to suppose that the past is over and done with or that it can ever safely be disconnected from the pressing concerns of the present.
Christopher Kelly
Having had nothing, I will not settle for crumbs.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.
Rebecca Solnit
He was more than comfortable with the language of imperious persuasion.
Dan Jones
Use your profession to fund your passion.
Habeeb Akande
The king's "only interest in government was a pious but simpleminded desire for reproachment
Dan Jones
I believe the road to preeminent success in any line is to make yourself master IN THAT LINE. I have no faith in the policy of scattering one's resources. Andrew Carnegie
H.W. Brands
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
James Howell
Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.
Rebecca Solnit
I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.
Washington Irving
Is there any reward?I'm beginning to doubt it.I am broken and bored,Is there any rewardReassure me, Good Lord,And inform me about it.Is there any reward?I'm beginning to doubt it.
Hilarie Belloc
JFK apparently felt genuine sympathy for his 1960 presidential opponent Richard Nixon. He felt that, with Nixon's frequent shifts in political philosophy and reinventions, he must have to decide which Nixon he will be at each stop. This, Kennedy reasoned, must be exhausting.
David Pietrusza
Do you ever make silly mistakes? It is one of my very few creative activities.
Len Deighton
I think one of the primary goals of a feminist landscape architecture would be to work toward a public landscape in which we can roam the streets at midnight, in which every square is available for Virginia Woolf to make up her novels
Rebecca Solnit
She was Lilith, First Wife of Adam, Queen of the Night, Mother of Demons, Stealer of Children, and he was her Revenant - her undead warrior. And she would use him, and the power of his spear, to destroy her enemies and punish her wayward children.,
Alan Kinross
Talent is always conscious of its own abundance and does not object to sharing.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You will never become who you want to be if you keep blaming everyone else for who you are.
Habeeb Akande
To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.
Robert Conquest
Enrollments in American colleges tripled between 1955 and 1970, 250% in the Soviet Union, 400% in France, and more than 200% in China by 1965. Gaddis writes, "What governments failed to foresee was that more young people, plus, more education, when combined with a stalemated Cold War, could be a prescription for insurrection. Learning does not easily compartmentalize. How do you prepare students to think for purposes approved by the state, or by their parents, without also equipping them to think for themselves? Youths throughout history had often wished question their elders values. Now, with university educations, their elders had handed them the training to do so. The result was discontent with the world as it was.
John Gaddis
A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.
Leszek Kołakowski
We think of communication as words. But a screaming child is trying to say something. A tantrum carries a message. Hitting is communication. Sleep patterns carry a message. Even the sulky belligerence of a teen is an attempt to convey a message. Everything the child does says something to the person who is willing to take the time to listen carefully.
Christopher Page
Why do these people love you, Archer? Is it simply because you show little or no response to their affection?
Len Deighton
I am very happy to see the enemy wish to avoid our coming to him. – Napoleon
Andrew Roberts
When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.
Stacy Schiff
A historian can never claim to have the last word on anything as he is limited by his sources and further so by his viewpoint.
Ambeth R. Ocampo
The curious fact is that biology tells us nothing about desire. And, when you think about it, culture -- novels, movies, opera, and quite a lot of painting -- is about desire, how we manage desire, how we suffer from it, and how it brings us joy when we get things right. A story without desire -- and that means without the insistence of desire -- will be empty, dry, and more or less aimless. That is one reason we read novels, to see how people fall into awkward moral situations and then try to extricate themselves. This is why there is so much anguish in the world: frustrated desire is every bit as miserable as poverty, because desire is no respecter of one’s position in life: everyone goes through it.
Peter Watson
Every true genius is bound to be naive.
Friedrich Schiller
Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street. -William BlakeThis admirable couplet should be posted in conspicuous places all over England. The truth it embodies is threatened by two parties of opinion: on the one hand by those who hold it as a sin against nature to try and control the increase of population in any way and on the other by those who believe in 'growth', the pursuit at all costs of a standard of living which entails more and more industrialization and urbanization. If the believers in nature have their way, England will in the end be so full of people that they will be jostling each other even on mountains: if the believers in 'growth' have their way, the whole country will be covered with streets and we shall hardly be aware that mountains exist.
David Cecil
[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.
Wallace Stegner
In the irresistible logic of guilt, one evil leads to another, one sin is developed out of another. There is nothing abrupt, nothing casual in the process. The road to sin is smooth, because an army of transgressions has passed over it. When such a development takes place, the community is filled with consternation. Men meet each other and say, "Have you heard what has happened? Mr. A. has turned out a defaulter. Mr. B. has been robbing his bank. How could he have done it?" Alas! he did it long ago, when he took the first step, when he diverged a very little way from the path of right. After that, every other step was easy, natural, and logical.
James Clarke
We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.
Jill Lepore
But its exclusive character and irreconcileable hostility to the religious cults and ceremonies with which the whole social life of the city-state and the empire were inseparably connected at every turn, brought the Christians into inevitable conflict with the government and with public opinion. To the man in the street, the Christian was an anti-social atheist who would take no part in the public feasts and the games, which played such a large part in city life. To the authorities he was a passive rebel, who would neither take his share of municipal offices nor pay loyal homage to the Emperor. Hence the rise of persecution, and the driving of the Christians into an underground existence, as a proscribed sect. The Church grew under the shadow of the executioner's rods and axes, and every Christian lived in the peril of physical torture and death. The thought of martyrdom coloured the whole outlook of early Christianity. But it was not only a fear, it was also an ideal and a hope. For the martyr was the complete Christian, he was the champion and hero of the new society and its conflict with the old, and even the Christians who failed in the moment of the trial - the lapsi - looked on the martyrs as their saviours and protectors
Christopher Henry Dawson
A respectful woman is a righteous woman.
Habeeb Akande
The father of Egyptology was Father Athanasius Kircher.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
The average human lifespan compared to the age of the universe is the same as comparing a blink of an eye to that human lifespan. Relatively speaking, short and long lifespans are the same. Both are non-existent compared to the infinite that’s ahead. Furthermore, we cannot change the past, and have no guarantees for the future. We are only in charge of the present. The present is nothing—and it is everything.
John K. Brown
Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like.
Rebecca Solnit
From the vantage of a mid-1970's consensus that regarded the United States as having entered a post-Protestant era, the rise of a Religious Right dominated not only by Protestants but by fundamentalists was not the way the story was supposed to go. People like Jerry Falwell looked like party crashers who, rather than slikinking from bar to buffet in hopes of going unnoticed, demanded that the vegetarian, alcohol-imbibing hosts serve meat and tell the bartender to go home.
D.G. Hart
Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence she acts for him. But the very fact that constitutes him a man is that he does not remain stationary, where nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical necessity into a moral law.
Friedrich Schiller
He accomplished wonders of diplomacy on the principle, never give way, and never give offense.
Barbara W. Tuchman
Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.
Barbara W. Tuchman
What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.
Jacques Barzun
Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Admiration is the daughter of ignorance.
Thomas Fuller
To return to the general analysis of the Rosicrucian outlook. Magic was a dominating factor, working as a mathematics-mechanics in the lower world, as celestial mathematics in the celestial world, and as angelic conjuration in the supercelestial world. One cannot leave out the angels in this world view, however much it may have been advancing towards the scientific revolution. The religious outlook is bound up with the idea that penetration has been made into higher angelic spheres in which all religions were seen as one; and it is the angels who are believed to illuminate man's intellectual activities.In the earlier Renaissance, the magi had been careful to use only the forms of magic operating in the elemental or celestial spheres, using talismans and various rituals to draw down favourable influences from the stars. The magic of a bold operator like Dee, aims beyond the stars, aims at doing the supercelestial mathematical magic, the angel-conjuring magic. Dee firmly believed that he had gained contact with good angels from whom he learned advancement in knowledge. This sense of close contact with angels or spiritual beings is the hallmark of the Rosicrucian. It is this which infuses his technology, however practical and successful and entirely rational in its new understanding of mathematical techniques, with an unearthly air, and makes him suspect as possibly in contact, not with angels, but with devils.
Frances A. Yates
There seems to be a different Chicago around every street corner, behind every bar, and within every apartment, two-flat, cottage, or bungalow. City of immigrants or city of heartless plutocrats, say what you will, Chicago almost defies interpretation. In many ways Chicago is like a snake that sheds its skin every thirty years or so and puts on a new coat to conform to a new reality.
Dominic A. Pacyga
I like incidents of that sort, when forces that are usually so sneaky and hard to point out slither out of the grass and are as obvious as, say, an anaconda that's eaten a cow or an elephant turd on the carpet.
Rebecca Solnit
Talk helps shape one's thoughts.
David McCullough
I am better than my reputation.
Friedrich von Schiller
Arthur managed to speak to his grandmother [Queen Eleanor of England], demanding that she evacuate the castle with all her possessions and then go peaceably wherever she wished, for he wanted to show nothing but honour to her person. The Queen replied that she would not leave it, but if he behaved as a courtly gentlemen, he would quit this place, for he would find plenty of castles to attack other than the one she was in.
Alison Weir
Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of history in the west, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a slave.
Rebecca Solnit