Quotes by Historians - Page 34

Be a wife of whom he can make no complaint, Margaret. That is the best advice I can give to you. You will be his wife; that is to be his servant, his possession. He will be your master. You had better please him.
Philippa Gregory
Those who mistake their good luck for their merit are inevitably bound for disaster.
J. Christopher Herold
There is a gaping hole in the history of the Holocaust. Between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Mengele there was a hierarchy of scientists whom were responsible for writing the infamous racial legislation of the Third Reich. These scientists, doctors, and legislators enjoyed prestigious positions in the various institutions within Hitler's Germany. To be more precise, many of the ghastly experiments credited to Mengele were ordered by this group of high-ranking scientists and doctors. Mengele was following their orders, yet many of these German doctors and scientists were set free after being captured by the Allies. Previously unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, and conveniently forgotten publications reveal professional and political relationships as well as shared scientific convictions between high-profile American Progressives, British Fabian Socialists, and their German counterparts. The mounting evidence points to the long-standing designs and machinations of "scientific racism", a still poorly understood aspect of history. This book documents the hundred year trajectory of the history of "scientific racism" from its initial intentions to create "a race of masters" to the Holocaust, which resulted from Hitler's conviction to create a "master race". These scientific prejudices and political dogmas are as relevant today as they were leading up to WWII. A thorough understanding of the origins of this movement is in order.
A.E. Samaan
Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.
John Charles Chasteen
I do not believe in equality of results. I believe in "equal opportunity" and "equality before the law".
A.E. Samaan
Of all the chemical transmitter substances sloshing around in your brain, it appears that dopamine may be the most directly related to the neural correlates of belief. Dopamine, in fact, is critical in association learning and the reward system of the brain that Skinner discovered through his process of operant conditioning, whereby any behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated. A reinforcement is, by definition, something that is rewarding to the organism; that is to say, it makes the brain direct the body to repeat the behavior in order to get another positive reward.
Michael Shermer
When the Lakota chief Red Cloud finally quit fighting the intruders, he reportedly told a white delegation, "We didn't need all this land, and neither did you.
Scott Zesch
In each of the early surahs, God spoke intimately to the individual, often preferring to pose many of his teachings in the form of a question - 'Have you not heard?' 'Do you consider?' 'Have you not seen?'. Each listener was thus invited to interrogate him or herself. Any response to these queries was usually grammatically ambiguous or indefinite, leaving the audience with an image on which to meditate but with no decisive answer. This new religion was not about achieving metaphysical certainty; the Quran wanted people to develop a different kind of awarness.
Karen Armstrong
...I don't ever want to feel that way. Feel as if there are no surprises left. The surprises make life worth living. Expecting nothing, accepting it all. Accepting isn't the right word. ACKNOWLEDGING it all. I suppose I'll just try to figure it out as I go or at least try to understand it. Or f***, just think about it. I'll face whatever comes my way...
John O'Callaghan
The Romans feared their dead. In fact, Roman funeral customs derived from a need to propitiate the sensibilities of the departed. The very word funus may be translated as dead body, funeral ceremony, or murder. There was a genuine concern that, if not treated appropriately, the spirits of the dead, or manes, would return to wreak revenge
Catharine Arnold
The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.
Charles Kingsley
A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.
Rick Perlstein
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
Michel Foucault
A new friend is always a miracle...One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
Henry Adams
Be civilized. Grudges are for Neanderthals. – Hubert Humphrey
David Pietrusza
On mounting a rising ground, which brought the figure of his fellow-traveller in relief against the sky, gigantic in height, and muffled in a cloak, Ichabod was horror-struck on perceiving that he was headless!--but his horror was still more increased on observing that the head, which should have rested on his shoulders, was carried before him on the pommel of his saddle!
Washington Irving
On any given morning, I might not be able to list for you the facts I know about God. But I can tell you what I wish to commit myself to, what I want for the foundation of my life, how I want to see. When I stand with the faithful at Holy Comforter and declare that we believe in one God . . . I am saying, Let this be my scaffolding. Let this be the place I work, struggle, play, rest. I commit myself to this.
Lauren F. Winner
Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.
Rebecca Solnit
It's no use crying over spilt milkWhat’s done, is done.
James Howell
Embrace the pain to inherit the gain.
Habeeb Akande
At Bow Street Magistrates' Court the essential facts were established. The man's name was James Tilly Matthews. He was a pauper of the south London parish of Camberwell. He had a wife and a young family. He appeared to be of unsound mind.
Mike Jay
Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at those problems that they cannot see beyond them. Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity--seeing the troubles in this world--and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.
Rebecca Solnit
We must recognize that we cannot depend on the governments of the world to abolish war because they and the economic interests they represent benefit from war.
Howard Zinn
People think of our life as harsh, and of course in many ways it is. But going into the unknown world and confronting it without a single rupee in our pockets means that differences between rich and poor, educated and illiterate, all vanish, and a common humanity emerges. As wanderers, we monks and nuns are free of shadows from the past. This wandering life, with no material possessions, unlocks our souls. There is a wonderful sense of lightness, living each day as it comes, with no sense of ownership, no weight, no burden. Journey and destination became one, thought and action became one, until it is as if we are moving like a river into complete detachment.
William Dalrymple
We are more curious about the meaning of dreams than about things we see when awake.
Diogenes Laërtius
Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Thucydides
[Philip's death was] beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.... He was truly a fine youth. But why should I repine? It was the will of heaven and he is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity. (Alexander Hamilton letter to Benjamin Rush about the death of his 19-year old son from mortal wounds inflicted from a duel.)
Ron Chernow
If we cannot agree on what was important yesterday, what more on events that happened a hundred or three hundred years ago? The point here is that history is open ended and we cannot be sure about the past. So why study history? Because it teaches us to see the connections between events. Knowing how and why a certain event happened is helpful because in many cases people separated by time and place can sometimes be in similar situations. They can be mentally contemporaneous without knowing it. History gives us hindsight.
Ambeth R. Ocampo
That said, the question remains: how to strike the balance between free speech and mutual respect in this mixed-up world, both blessed and cursed with instant communication? We should not fight fire with fire, threats with threats.
Timothy Garton Ash
His (Lenin's)humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, or even interest in, humanity in particular. He saw the people with whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for his ideas. On that basis, and no other, they were judged. He judged man not by their moral qualities but by their views, or rather the degree to which they accepted his.
Paul Johnson
Reading. The erotics of reading for me -- its moment of trembling pleasure -- lie in those times when I realise that what I am reading is just what I was about to say. It is a moment of jealousy and disappointment, as if the occasion had been stolen from me, but it is a moment of excitement, too -- because I think I would like to try and say it better, because now the monologue in my mind has become dialogue. My immediate impulse is to write something, anything, notes to tell me the significance of what I have read, an appreciative letter to the author, the first sentences in a preface to a book that will never be written. Th archives of my readings are monumentally high. I can never let these erotic moments go. They are the paper trail of my mind.
Greg Dening
The proof of how real Jesus knew hell to be is that He came to earth to save us from it.
Peter Marshall
Allaah subhanahuu, rejects those who refused Allaah’s Shareeah; the laws that are good for the Muslims; the laws that forbid what is evil. Allaah rejects those who follow laws of personal desires and who adopt laws of Kufr such as the laws enforced by the Tartars who were under the control of Gengiz Khan, their king. These laws were a mixture of Judaism, Christianity and laws chosen by their king that suited his desires. Should we prefer these laws to the Sharee`ah of Allaah and His Prophet (sallallahu alaihi wa sallam)?
Ibn Kathir
Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to a man himself.
Karl Marx
This isn't a war," said the artilleryman. "It never was a war, any more than there's war between man and ants.
H.G.Wells
Arguably the greatest technological triumph of the century has been the public-health system, which is sophisticated preventive and investigative medicine organized around mostly low- and medium-tech equipment; ... fully half of us are alive today because of the improvements.
Richard Rhodes
Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
It might be termed the Law of Triviality. Briefly stated it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in adverse proportion to the sum involved.
Northcote Parkinson
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant
Americans in 1763 lived always in the shadow and presence of death. Death was not yet romanticized as it would be in the 19th century, nor yet sanitized as it would be in the 20th century.
Colin G. Calloway
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
Karl Marx
Be a philosopher but amid all your philosophy be still a man.
David Hume
Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is.
Howard Zinn
WHITE NATIONALISTS & BLACK LIVES MATTER: The harder you swing the pendulum one way, the more violently it will swing back.
A.E. Samaan
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.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.
David McCullough
The source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think....Let us dare to read, think, speak, write.
David McCullough
The greatness of the object enabled my mind to support what my strengths of body was scarce equal to.
Barbara W. Tuchman
Since the dawn of time, nearly every man (and I'd wager to guess most women) has, at his most visceral level, secretly desired for one thing - to be standing triumphantly atop a heaping pile of his slain enemies, holding a gigantic axe aloft while some unbelievably attractive member of whatever gender he's attracted to desperately clutches his leg like it's the last life raft on the HMS Titanic.
Ben Thompson
A "racist" thinks themselves better than other races. An "elitist" thinks they are better than everyone.
A.E. Samaan
The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years.
Will Durant
Harmony makes small things grow. Lack of it makes big things decay.
Sallust
This is desire, daughter, the endless piercing that informs the universe throughout eternity,
John Speed
In the 300 years of the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course, of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions, to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.
Yuval Noah Harari
Far from a source of suffering, their adopted faith had been a source of power.
Barbara W. Tuchman
To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]
David McCullough
I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.
A.E. Samaan
Where error is irreparable, repentance is useless.
Edward Gibbon
The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.
Russell Kirk
I inhale hope with every breath I take.
Sharon Kay Penman