Quotes by Historians - Page 41

Treatment for people with disabilities and mental illness in prewar America reveals a profoundly ignorant medical establishment and educational community.
Kate Clifford Larson
You are not here merely to making a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement.
Woodrow Wilson
The worst hatred is that of relatives.
Tacitus
The sweetest of all sounds is praise.
Xenophon
Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.
Barbara W. Tuchman
We shall never have friends if we expect to find them without fault.
Thomas Fuller
I trust my wife's judgement... That's what Philippe says about Granny, just before all hell breaks loose.
Deborah Harkness
Every infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade. When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to dig a hole in the ground beside him.
Viktor Suvorov
In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.
Timothy B. Tyson
George was an atheist, and so am I. But how I long now for an afterlife - a world of light or of deep dazzling darkness, where he and the others we've lost reside, unscathed, forever accessible - to have tea with, to talk nonsense with, to reinvent the world with
Justin Spring
Never speak about private affairs for the general public to hear.
Habeeb Akande
One paper boasted that its subscription and advertising numbers proved that America did not need the social change it rival paper advocated.
Harold Holzer
Young, healthy communities can afford to roll the dice.
Richard Brookhiser
One straying angel won’t make God tremble.
Ada Palmer
In an age that valued prolonged and detailed exposition, complexity, and repetition it was astonishing that Luther should have instinctively discerned the value of brevity.
Andrew Pettegree
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
Rebecca Solnit
What the orators want in depth they give you in length.
Charles Montesquieu
Deeply rooted in the universalist Western tradition of the Stoics and the the early medieval Christians, Tolkien created a myth to explore the nature of the human person against the avaricious dreams of the capitalists and the diabolical schemes of the national and international socialists, all of whom would replace God with man.
Bradley J. Birzer
The eternal stars shine out as soon as it is dark enough.
Thomas Carlyle
Hitler derived several things from his experience and achievements in World War I, without which his rise to power in 1933 would have been at the least problematical, and at the most inconceivable. Hitler survived the war as a combat soldier—a rifle carrier—in a frontline infantry regiment. The achievement was an extraordinary one based on some combination of near-miraculous luck and combat skill. The interpretive fussing over whether or not Hitler was a combat soldier because he spent most of the war in the part of the regiment described as regimental headquarters can be laid to rest as follows: Any soldier in an infantry regiment on an active front in the west in World War I must be considered to have been a combat soldier. Hitler’s authorized regimental weapon was the Mauser boltaction, magazine-fed rifle. This gives a basic idea of what Hitler could be called upon to do in his assignment at the front. As a regimental runner, he carried messages to the battalions and line companies of the regiment, and the more important ones had to be delivered under outrageously dangerous circumstances involving movement through artillery fire and, particularly later in the war, poison gas and the omnipresent rifle fire of the skilled British sniper detach
Russel H.S. Stolfi
Evolution of mind was altogether another matter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals. This matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result. La Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in morals, stood higher than man; and in view of the late civil war, Adams had doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution:
Henry Adams
In the 1960 campaign, Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Adlai Stevenson, who already lost twice as the party's presidential nominee, "He has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality, a certain frivolity, distractedness, over-interest in words and phrases.
David Pietrusza
... he preferred being stimulated to being bored.
Ruth Harris
Life is more fragile and precious than I can comprehend, but believe me, I'm trying.
John O'Callaghan
It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
Charles A. Beard
Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
I think the two things most opposed to good counsel are haste and passion; haste usaully goes hand in hand with folly, passion with coarseness and narrowness of mind.
Thucydides
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
Henry Brooks Adams
Imam al-Dhahabi (Allah have mercy on him) points out to the signs of having a sincere intention or otherwise, He mentions that the one who seeks knowledge for the sake of Allah Most High, then that knowledge creates in him humility, humbleness and the fear of Allah. And the one who seeks knowledge for worldly gains, he becomes proud with his knowledge, thus argues and quarrels with other Muslims. (See: al-Muqizah, p. 65.)
Imam al-Dhahabi
The past is but the beginning of a beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
H.G.Wells
Common sense and every material reality insisted upon the unification of human life throughout the planet and the socialisation of its elementary needs, and pitted against that was the fact that every authority, every institution, every established way of thinking and living was framed to preserve the advantages of the ruling and possessing minority and the separate sovereignty of the militant states that had been evolved within the vanished circumstances of the past.
H.G.Wells
I have ever held it as a maxim never to do that through another which it was possible for me to execute myself.
Charles Montesquieu
Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.
Jared Diamond
We enter the world alone we leave it alone.
James Froude
...you sometimes note an impatience on the part of a specialist that the public does not show sufficient interest in his assemblage of information as such. He is likely to conclude that the average person is somewhat stupid. The opposite is true. It is a sign of native intelligence on the part of any person not to clutter his mind with indigestibles.
Freeman Tilden
I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me was about to happen to me.
William Manchester
Disorder is the least tolerable up sinful conditions.
Barbara W. Tuchman
If you cannot walk more than a block in your shoes, they are not shoes; they are pretty sculptures that you happen to have attached to your feet. You could hang them from your wrists for all the good they are doing you in terms of locomotion. Better to put them on a shelf and admire them from afar.
Linda Przybyszewski
Slavery received, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary.
Alexis de Tocqueville
If we do not believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we do not believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky
In the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, they read usually, not as today, principally with the eyes, but with the lips, pronouncing what they saw, and with the ears, listening to the words pronounced. hearing what is called the "voices of the pages." It is a real acoustical reading.
Jean Leclercq
Little boys run in gangs, grown men organise teams.
Habeeb Akande
Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.
Philippa Gregory
The whole people contracts the habits and tastes of the magistrate.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.
Gerald Brenan
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.
Howard Zinn
Finally, his whole body burst into flames and as the pain became unbearable, he threw his arms in the air and screamed in agony. In his final moments, the words of the Nazarene echoed through his mind: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Alan Kinross
An agile, well-trained, brave elephant, ridden by a good mahout, its trunk armed with the kind of sabre known as a qartal and covered with chain mail, while the rest of its body is protected by sheets of bark and iron, surrounded by 500 men to defend it and protect it to the rear, can fight against 6000 men on horseback.
Al-Mas'udi
After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover...in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought.
Michel Foucault
My life seems to have become suddenly hollow and I do not know what is hanging over me. I cannot even put the shadow that has fallen on me into words. At least into written words. I would give a great deal for a friend's voice.
John Addington Symonds
The arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause.
Michael Kazin
I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.
Will Durant
Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.
Rebecca Solnit
...it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.
Karl Marx
The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.
Noam Chomsky
The product of scientific achievements should be for sale. The scientist should not.
A.E. Samaan
In many ways, the steamships of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had become the secular equivalent of medieval cathedrals. They were the source of endless pride to the communities and nations that built them, and were just as much an expression of men's hopes and dreams of technical perfection as the great churches had once been of hopes for spiritual purity.
Daniel Allen Butler
We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
George F. Kennan
I hate when I look in my closet and find clothes instead of Narnia.
H.B. Bolton
Almost all great writers have as their motif, more or less disguised, the passage from childhood to maturity, the clash between the thrill of expectation and the disillusioning knowledge of truth. 'Lost Illusion' is the undisclosed title of every novel.
André Maurois