Quotes by Historians - Page 4

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Claire Cross
Even so, I think historians have more to offer than perspective on our present woes. The foreign country we call the past also lets us look beyond the horizons of what is, to see what could be.
Rutger Bregman
There was a period when the capitalist system increased the well-being of significant numbers of people as a by-product of seeking out profits for a few, but today the quests for profits comes into sharp conflict with people’s demands that their material and social needs should be fulfilled. Pg. 10
Walter Rodney
Reagan is described as "delivering Barry Goldwater's doctrine with John F. Kennedy's technique.
H.W. Brands
It turns out there is something worse than attending a wedding where you don't know anyone: attending a wedding where you know six people, and they are all your ex-husband's best friends.
Lauren F. Winner
An idiot child screaming in a hospital." (on George Bernard Shaw)
H.G.Wells
To relinquish a present good through apprehension of a future evil is in most instances unwise ... from a fear which may afterwards turn out groundless you lost the good that lay within your grasp.
Francesco Guicciardini
When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Karl Marx
Chance does nothing that has not been prepared beforehand.
Alexis de Tocqueville
...[E]xcept the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an intermitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period. Upon the slightest and most unreasonable pretences, as well as upon accusations the most absurd and groundless, their persons and property were exposed to every turn of popular fury... Yet the passive courage inspired by the love of gain induced the Jews to dare the various evils to which they were subjected, in consideration of the immense profits which they were enabled to realise in a country naturally so wealthy as England. In spite of every kind of discouragement, and even of the special court of taxations already mentioned, called the Jews' Exchequer, erected for the very purpose of despoiling and distressing them, the Jews increased, multiplied, and accumulated huge sums, which they transferred from one hand to another by means of bills of exchange-an invention for which commerce is said to be indebted to them, and which enabled them to transfer their wealth from land to land, that, when threatened with oppression in one country, their treasure might be secured in another. The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the persecution with which they were visited...
Sir Walter Scott
Virtually every literary piece written about Adolf Hitler in more than half a century since 1945 has been based on anti
Russel H.S. Stolfi
Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action a superior mind exists in torture.
Benedetto Croce
Big Government' is a lot less like a 'Big Brother', and a lot more like a mother-in-law.
A.E. Samaan
To be in the presence of a great leader is to know a blighted soul who has managed to make the darkness work for him. Ishmael says it best: "For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but a disease." In chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck," Melville show us how susceptible we ordinary people are to the seductive power of a great and demented man.
Nathaniel Philbrick
As a pauper, the obvious destination for James Tilly Matthews was the Bethlem Hospital, already long known in popular slang as Bedlam. The principal public asylum in London, it had accepted dangerous and insane paupers as 'objects of charity' for centuries, and was proud of the claim that it had never turned anyone away.
Mike Jay
Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible.
Karl Marx
It is amazing how desperately the self-proclaimed revolutionaries grope for their own orthodoxy.
A.E. Samaan
Ignorance is not a capital crime. It is a correctable condition.
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Some women who married and also had lesbian relationships were genuinely bisexual. Many others married because they could see no other viable choice in the day.
Lillian Faderman
[T]hat mutual jealousy, that intolerantly keen edge of criticism, that irrational hunger for a beautiful perfection, that life and wisdom do presently and most mercifully dull.
H.G.Wells
There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There is must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope, or I could not live. And so, in hope and solitude, my story ends.
H.G.Wells
It is love and reason,' I said,'fleeing from all the madness of war.
H.G.Wells
Polls could be self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping reality as much as they described it.
Rick Perlstein
You have found love in your heart - and out of small changes come great things.
Alan Kinross
If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.
Rebecca Solnit
Finally, the work of the minister tended to be judged by his success in a single area - the saving of souls in measurable numbers. The local minister was judged either by his charismatic powers or by his ability to prepare his congregation for the preaching of some itinerant ministerial charmer who would really awaken its members. The 'star' system prevailed in religion before it reached the theater. As the evangelical impulse became more widespread and more dominant, the selection and training of ministers was increasingly shaped by the revivalist criterion of ministerial merit. The Puritan ideal of the minister as an intellectual and educational leader was steadily weakened in the face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a popular crusader and exhorter. Theological education itself became more instrumental. Simple dogmatic formulations were considered sufficient. In considerable measure the churches withdrew from intellectual encounters with the secular world, gave up the idea that religion is a part of the whole life of intellectual experience, and often abandoned the field of rational studies on the assumption that they were the natural province of science alone. By 1853 an outstanding clergyman complained that there was 'an impression, somewhat general, that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety, and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect.
Richard Hofstadter
Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?Two things result from this fact.I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.
Karl Marx
And in friendship and still more here, in this central business of love, accident rules it seems to me almost altogether. What personalities you will encounter in life, and have for a chief interest in life, is nearly as much a matter of chance as the drift of a grain of pollen in the pine forest. And once the light hazard has blown it has blown, never to drive again.
H.G.Wells
A righteous husband is a responsible husband.
Habeeb Akande
Lincoln had a stubborn concern for first principles.
Richard Brookhiser
This is Communism's view of war. War is necessary. War is an instrument for achieving a goal.But unfortunately for Communism, this policy ran up against the American atomic bomb in 1945. Then the Communists changed their tactics and suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We attribute to ourselves qualities that we do not possess because if we possessed them, our lives would exactly mirror our image of ourselves. Our lies about what is really happening in our lives are what we use to "patch up" our ego with rationalizations and justifications, all of which conceal from us the fact that we cannot really do anything because we have no Being.
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.
David McCullough
Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
Will Durant
The world has enough women who know how to be smart. It needs women who are willing to be simple. The world has enough women who know how to be brilliant. It needs some who will be brave. The world has enough women who are popular. It needs more who are pure. We need women, and men, too, who would rather be morally right than socially correct.
Peter Marshall
Bears find themselves at the spot where two deep-seated but contradictory human impulses collide: the desire to feel protected from unforeseeable danger and the longing for unspoiled nature.
Bernd Brunner
Enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first an ideal which takes the imagination by storm and sec ond a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.
Arnold J. Toynbee
I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.
Niall Ferguson
The Umayyad caliphate stretched from Spain to India, making it the largest empire in the world
Firas Alkhateeb
When it is dark enough you can see the stars.
Charles A. Beard
Thinking this is "The One" becomes an excuse to let your own life deteriorate.
TammyJo Eckhart
This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.
Yuval Noah Harari
Neither in the life of the individual nor in that of mankind is it desirable to know the future.
Jakob Burckhardt
The mid-19th century was noted for a partisan, rather than a consensus press, but this partisanship was able to turn out voters consistently.
Harold Holzer
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
The Devil himself is good when he is pleased.
Thomas Fuller
Jefferson was the rare student who came to college already knowing that there could be joy in studying.
John Ferling
War cannot eliminate differing ideas and viewpoints, and partisans of the defeated side do not disappear. Though subjugated, they become a sizable political constituency in the postwar period. A dictator may be able to repress them, and in democracies a numerical majority may outvote them, but neither can change their thoughts. Since civil wars are, by nature, deep and fundamental conflicts, the competition between the views that led to war is likely to resurface. The defeated side may be chastened or subdued, but its values and ways of seeing the world reappear, in some form, in politics [107].
Paul D. Escott
Above all I needed to be made to think about what it meant that I was a woman, instead of acting unreflectingly as though I were a man, bound to live out the script of a man’s life.
Jill Ker Conway
Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
Wallace Stegner
There is a certain relief in change even though it be from bad to worse as I have found in travelling in a stagecoach that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.
Washington Irving
The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.
Sir William Osier
Living in the past kills your future.
Habeeb Akande
We choose our favourite author as we do our friend, from a conformity of humour and disposition. Mirth or passion, sentiment or reflection; whichever of these most predominates in our temper, it gives us a peculiar sympathy with the writer who resembles us.
David Hume
The War Department in Washington briefly weighed more ambitious schemes to relieve the Americans on a large scale before it was too late. But by Christmas of 1941, Washington had already come to regard Bataan as a lost cause. President Roosevelt had decided to concentrate American resources primarily in the European theater rather than attempt to fight an all-out war on two distant fronts. At odds with the emerging master strategy for winning the war, the remote outpost of Bataan lay doomed. By late December, President Roosevelt and War Secretary Henry Stimson had confided to Winston Churchill that they had regrettably written off the Philippines. In a particularly chilly phrase that was later to become famous, Stimson had remarked, 'There are times when men have to die.
Hampton Sides
The degree of ignorance cannot easily be expressed. We may say, for instance, that nearly two-thirds of them cannot read or write. This but partially expresses the fact. They are ignorant of the world about them, of modern economic organization, of the function of government, of individual worth and possibilities,—of nearly all those things which slavery in self-defence had to keep them from learning. Much that the white boy imbibes from his earliest social atmosphere forms the puzzling problems of the black boy’s mature years. America is not another word for Opportunity to all her sons.
W.E.B. Du Bois
. And it especially cannot endure when powerful groups in that society seek at every turn to undermine and destroy its very being. The threats to democracy are not always from enemies abroad. They can come from those within who espouse the language of democracy and use the liberties afforded them by democratic institutions to undermine the substance of democracy. Weimar cautions us to be wary of those people as well. What comes next can be very bad, even worse than imaginable.
Eric D. Weitz
Hoping to apply what few marketable skills I'd acquired in school, I used my undergraduate's Hebrew to check into options in Israel. I was eager to travel, open to adventure, but as a non-Jew, I found that my possible motives were a cause for concern. In more than one interview I was asked a question that I would eventually hear word for word from Malpesh himself: Are you some sort of missionary? To my prospective employers I tried to explain that if I was to convert anyone it would only be to a nebulous wishy-washy agnosticism, but this honest answer did not earn me many callbacks.
Peter Manseau
If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.
Yuval Noah Harari