Quotes by Historians - Page 35

Dirac's equation not only accounted for the spin of the electron and its observed magnetic moment, but also correctly explained the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. If the derivation of the Sommerfeld-like formula for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was one of the striking successes of the Dirac equation, some of its other features were very troublesome.
Silvan S. Schweber
[A]s long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if meaningful.
Noam Chomsky
Shelves full of books are all around me. Opening the different volumes I take a look, and find the pages covered with writings in unknown scripts — tadpole traces, bird feet markings, twisted branches. And in my dream I am able to read them all, to make sense of everything despite its difficulty.
Jonathan D. Spence
Kindness is stronger than iron bars.
Margaret George
The thoughts of a prisoner—they're not free either. They kept returning to the same things. A single idea keeps stirring. Would they feel that piece of bread in the mattress? Would he have any luck in the dispensary that evening? Would they out Buinovsky in the cells? And how did Tsezar get his hands on that warm vest?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).
Lauro Martines
Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.
Rebecca Solnit
Every man knows that he will die: and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of a sane being.
John Myers Myers
The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.
Isaac Deutscher
The old repeat themselves and the young have nothing to say. The boredom is mutual.
Jacques Bainville
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.
Will Durant
You can't make the right decision, but you can always make the dicision right.
Thomas Murdock
The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
Henry Adams
Art is difficult transient is her reward.
Friedrich von Schiller
Snobs talk as if they had begotten their ancestors.
Herbert Agar
No one says: when my family treated me as a stranger, I preferred the company of strangers, and I walked among strangers and what did I find but God in every one of their faces.
Joanna Brooks
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
Wallace Stegner
Anger is one of the sinners of the soul.
Thomas Fuller
The affair made men feel larger than life.
Barbara W. Tuchman
I like to introduce myself, because THEN I can get in all the facts." The usually self-deprecating John Hay on the ironic formality of signing his own commission as Secretary of State.
John Taliaferro
There is in every true woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
Washington Irving
Perhaps walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.
Rebecca Solnit
Explanation is where the mind rests.
David Hume
There was no outlet, my fear was so deep and tangible I couldn't scream. It felt like an actual substance that enveloped my body, my brain, my very being, I receded further and further within myself, a dark hole, my entire body a taut muscle.
James Morris
In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values. . . .History with a capital H is being called in to fill the void. It restores a sense not necessarily of a divine being but of something above and beyond human beings. It is our authority: it can vindicate us and judge us, and damn those who oppose us.
Margaret MacMillan
Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A (best-seller) is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.
Daniel J. Boorstin
In the final analysis, what is it that we call popular, democratic power? Beyond the expressed will of the people, as it is supposedly formulated, there is no appeal; here we meet the absolute, the universal, the indivisible, and the immovable. There is nothing a priori, nothing anterior to democratic power; no ideas of truth, no notions of good or bad, can bind the Popular Will. This 'will' is free in the sense that it stands above all notions of value. It is egalitarian because it is reared on arithmetic equality..It is not open to any appeal, it listens to no demand for grace, no plea for compassion. Like the Sphinx, the Popular Will is immovable in its enigmatic silence.
Tage Lindbom
If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.
Friedrich Schiller
Remove yourself, sir!
David McCullough
Because we have only one (life) we go about blundering along him nervous haste.
John Taliaferro
He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.
Irving Howe
He who wants to do everything will never do anything.
André Maurois
Republics are brought to their ends by luxury monarchies by poverty.
Baron de Montesquieu
I understood the life around me better, not from love, which everybody acknowledges to be a great teacher, but from estrangement, to which nobody has attributed the power of reinforcing insight
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
Unfortunately for humanity, God is patient enough to actually enjoy watching the grass grow.
A.E. Samaan
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
David Hume
There was still a bit of sunshine in the sky, not that it mattered. High treetops and reaching branches entombed us from above in a dark coffin. It was still in the afternoon. We had time to gather things together for camp, but the choked rays that permeated the living casket were sputtering their last bits of life. — Tyrus Savage narration from ORRLETH, Volume One of the Orrleth Young Adult Fantasy Paranormal Series
Thomas McClellan
The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability.
David McCullough
I think, therefore I am an individual... not a drone in a collective. I think, therefore I am... Libertarian.
A.E. Samaan
The spirit of the gospel is optimistic; it trusts in God and looks on the bright side of things. The opposite or pessimistic spirit drags men down and away from God, looks on the dark side, murmurs, complains, and is slow to yield obedience.
Orson F. Whitney
John’s standard maneuver to ask someone to help him, especially in a moment of crisis,
William R. Forstchen
It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee
We are but phantoms, and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights - so be it! But one thing is real and certain, one thing is no dream-stuff, but eternal and enduring. It is the centre of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or altogether vain. I loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are dead together!
H.G.Wells
Of all the paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path ... a thing which here and now it were of all things wisest for him to do ... to find this path and walk in it is the one thing needful for him.
Thomas Carlyle
Ibn al-Arabi gave this advice:Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exclusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, is not limited by any one creed, for he says, 'Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah' (Koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the disbelief of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.
Karen Armstrong
Lincoln on a desire to hear Horace Greeley speak: "In print, every one of his words seems to weigh about a ton.
Harold Holzer
John Hay on Lincoln: "He always worked with things as they were, while never relinquishing the desire to make them better.
John Taliaferro
If you remember the pleasure of hearing a story many times, and you will remember that while you were listening you become three people. There is an incredible fusion: you become the storyteller, the protagonist, and you remember yourself listening to the story.
Marina Warner
My eyes moved over his face. His chiseled jaw and high cheekbones twisted in agony. Even writhing he was beautiful, muscles clenching and unclenching, revealing his strenght, his body's fight against its impending collapse, rendering his torture sublime. Desire to help him consumed me.I can't watch him die.
Andrea Cremer
If you would understand your own age read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.
Arthur Helps
As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely.
Michel Foucault
Part of what makes roads, trails and paths so unique as built structures is that they cannot be perceived as a whole all at once by a sedentary onlooker. They unfold in time as one travels along them, just as a story does as one listens or reads, and a hairpin turn is like a plot twist, a steep ascent a building of suspense to the view at the summit, a fork in the road an introduction of a new storyline, arrival the end of the story. Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there…
Rebecca Solnit
1. Do what you say you're gonna do 2. Show up! 3. Give genuine praise whenever you can 4. Never say sorry when you don't mean it 5. Never use sarcasm in email (and use the corny ass emoticons)
Matthew Lasar
Far from being Eurocentric, my analysis "exoticizes" Europe. Europe is historically aberrant. In some ways this was a historical accident, not entirely Europe's fault. But, in any case, it is nothing about which Europe should boast. Perhaps Europe and the world will one day be cured of this terrible malady with which Europe (and through Europe the world) has been afflicted.
Immanuel Wallerstein
John Hay calls the telegraph reporter, "the natural enemy of the scribe.
Harold Holzer
He that handles a nettle tenderly is soonest stung.
Thomas Fuller
But search the land of living men Where wilt thou find their like again.
Sir Walter Scott
Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.
Iris Chang
It was lunar symbolism that enabled man to relate and connect such heterogeneous things as: birth, becoming, death, and ressurection; the waters, plants, woman, fecundity, and immortality; the cosmic darkness, prenatal existence, and life after death, followed by the rebirth of the lunar type ("light coming out of darkness"); weaving, the symbol of the "thread of life," fate, temporality, and death; and yet others. In general most of the ideas of cycle, dualism, polarity, opposition, conflict, but also of reconciliation of contraries, of coincidentia oppositorum, were either discovered or clarified by virtue of lunar symbolism. We may even speak of a metaphysics of the moon, in the sense of a consistent system of "truths" relating to the mode of being peculiar to living creatures, to everything in the cosmos that shares in life, that is, in becoming, growth and waning, death and ressurrection.
Mircea Eliade
There is no single concept of nature; it embraces everything that is fluid, changing, and mysterious. Ultimately, however, to “know nature” on earth is to live within it and to revere it in every way.
Carolyn Merchant