Quotes by Historians - Page 46

It costs about the same to house a maximum-security young adult prisoner for a year as it does to send his law-abiding counterpart to Harvard.
Robert Martensen
If one is forever cautious can one remain a human being?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The pleasures of the rich are bought with the tears of the poor.
Thomas Fuller
The author's alliterative description of politics since the 1960 presidential debates: "Government by Gotcha".
David Pietrusza
You can tell a lot about a society by what it fears.
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
It happens all too often - people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them.
Andrew Dalby
The theology of the cross is not a cerebral thing; it profoundly affects our Christian experience and existence, making demands upon our whole lives and turning theology into something which controls not just our thoughts, but the very way in which we experience the world around and taste the blessing and fellowship of God himself. pp.48-49
Carl R. Trueman
Any journalist who holds the office writes in a straitjacket.
Harold Holzer
As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
in time to come be shaped by the human mind.” Asked
Joseph J. Ellis
He is happy that knoweth not himself to be otherwise.
Thomas Fuller
Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.
Herodotus
Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to happen by the combination of such obscure entities as the ‘power’ or ‘mental activity’ assumed by naïve historians; indeed he was, in Kareev’s view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as ‘heroes’, ‘historic forces’, ‘moral forces’, ‘nationalism’, ‘reason’ and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or class, or metaphysical bias.
Isaiah Berlin
All of those things - rock and men and river - resisted change, resisted the coming as they did the going. Hood warmed and rose slowly, breaking open the plain, and cooled slowly over the plain it buried. The nature of things is resistance to change, while the nature of process is resistance to stasis, yet things and process are one, and the line from inorganic to organic and back is uninterrupted and unbroken.
William Least Heat-Moon
That’s how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously.
Yuval Noah Harari
Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Jerome
Data data everywhere but not a thought to think.
Theodore Roszak
If she does not respect you, she will replace you.
Habeeb Akande
The kind of work that should be the main part of life is the kind of work you would want to do if you weren't being paid for it. It's work that comes out of your own internal needs, interests and concerns.
Noam Chomsky
Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations.
Diane Ravitch
The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the painin the world had found a voice
H.G.Wells
It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood.
Wallace Stegner
Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.
Francesco Guicciardini
(When told that he is a drunk) My dear, you are ugly; but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.
Sir Winston Churchill
The desire to engineer humanity is a sign of a mind warped by megalomania and lust for power.
A.E. Samaan
Jack had an actor's control." Chuck Spalding
David Pietrusza
Men fear silence as they fear solitude because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.
André Maurois
Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.
Rick Perlstein
Although characterized as uncultured and unread, Hitler comes off in his demands to create a monumental signature for a Greater Germany as historically and artistically gi
Russel H.S. Stolfi
I propitiated the knife-wielding deities with presents of books. The gifts to them and the head of nursing were also meant to acknowledge that although people get paid to do their jobs, you cannot pay someone to do their job passionately and wholeheartedly. Those qualities are not for sale; they are themselves gifts that can only be given freely, and are in many, many fields.
Rebecca Solnit
Historiography -- commonly and often simultaneously defined as the study of historians' scholarship, how history has been and is contrived, the history of historical writing, and the body of historical scholarship on historical subject matter -- is, therefore, essential to understand when studying history.
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie
Great empires are not maintained by timidity.
Tacitus
The heroic and often tragic stories of American whalemen were renowned. They sailed the world’s oceans and brought back tales filled with bravery, perseverance, endurance, and survival. They mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, sang, spun yarns, scrimshawed, and recorded their musings and observations in journals and letters. They survived boredom, backbreaking work, tempestuous seas, floggings, pirates, putrid food, and unimaginable cold. Enemies preyed on them in times of war, and competitors envied them in times of peace. Many whalemen died from violent encounters with whales and from terrible miscalculations about the unforgiving nature of nature itself. And through it all, whalemen, those “iron men in wooden boats” created a legacy of dramatic, poignant, and at times horrific stories that can still stir our emotions and animate the most primal part of our imaginations. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” proclaimed Herman Melville, and the epic story of whaling is one of the mightiest themes in American history.
Eric Jay Dolin
Every woman is different in her own special way.
Habeeb Akande
My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present movement. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave.
H.G.Wells
Never lose sleep over someone who is not worth staying awake for.
Habeeb Akande
Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of political parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. DO NOT FALL FOR IT.
Timothy Snyder
Every age gets the lunatics it deserves.
Roy Porter
And this man, who had sailed round Europe and navigated the Great Northern Route, leaned happily over half a ladleful of thin oatmeal kasha, cooked entirely without fat - just oats and water.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Educate your children, educate yourself, in the love for the freedom of others, for only in this way will your own freedom not be a gratuitous gift from fate. You will be aware of its worth and will have the courage to defend it.
Joaquim Nabuco
A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit.
Barbara W. Tuchman
He that would have fruit must climb the tree.
Thomas Fuller
The author commented that John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign team worked like a band of brothers, while Richard Nixon's campaign team worked like a band of brothers in law under the direction of a quarrelsome aunt.
David Pietrusza
All prosperity begins in the mind and is dependent only upon the full use of our creative imagination.
Ruth Ross
...the holy men sat in an atmospherereeking of antiquity, so thick with thedust of ages that you can't see through it--nor can they.
Gertrude Bell
By the fall of 1918, it was clear that a nation's prosperity, even its very survival, depended on securing a safe, abundant supply of cheap oil.
Albert Marrin
The term "racist" comes from the word "racialist": Someone that sees the world from a racial prism.
A.E. Samaan
Among the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things ... only one, which began a century and a half ago ... has allowed the figure of man to appear.
Michel Foucault
If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.
Woodrow Wilson
The Japanese had no idea what elements of Western culture and institutions where the crucial ones, so they ended up copying everything, from western clothes and hair styles to the European practice of colonizing foreign people. Unfortunately, they took up empire-building at precisely the moment when the cost of imperialism began to exceed the benefits.
Niall Ferguson
Government as we now know it in the USA and other economically advanced countries is so manifestly horrifying, so corrupt, counterproductive, and outright vicious, that one might well wonder how it continues to enjoy so much popular legitimacy and to be perceived so widely as not only tolerable but indispensable. The answer, in overwhelming part, may be reduced to a two-part formula: bribes and bamboozlement (classically "bread and circuses"). Under the former rubric falls the vast array of government "benefits" and goodies of all sorts, from corporate subsidies and privileges to professional grants and contracts to welfare payments and health care for low-income people and other members of the lumpenproletariat. Under the latter rubric fall such measures as the government schools, the government's lapdog news media, and the government's collaboration with the producers of professional sporting events and Hollywood films. Seen as a semi-integrated whole, these measures give current governments a strong hold on the public's allegiance and instill in the masses and the elites alike a deep fear of anything that seriously threatens the status quo.
Robert Higgs
The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.
Rebecca Solnit
Whether democracy or aristocracy is the better form of government constitutes a very difficult question. But, clearly, democracy inconveniences one person while aristocracy oppresses another. That is a truth which establishes itself and precludes any discussion: you are rich and I am poor.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Nowhere in the world, Rud reflected, was journalism anything but a malignant and wanton power. Later on, as the Common-sense Movement grew, he had to think a lot about that. He had to spread a new system of ideas throughout the world, and journalism would neither instruct nor inform nor lend itself consistently to any sustained propaganda.
H.G.Wells
Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
All we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
Charles Kingsley
If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role.
Karen Armstrong
Checking a box on a form for race—"Caucasian," "Hispanic," "African-American," "Native American," or "Asian-American"—is untenable and ridiculous. For one thing, "American" is not a race, so labels such as "Asian-American" and "African-American" are still exhibits of our confusion of culture and race. For another thing, how far back does one go in history? Native Americans are really Asians, if you go back more than twenty or thirty thousand years to before they crossed the Bering land bridge between Asia and America. And Asians, several hundred thousand years ago probably came out of Africa, so we should really replace "Native American" with "African-Asian-Native American." Finally, if the Out of Africa (single racial origin) theory holds true, then all modern humans are from Africa. (Cavalli-Sforza now thinks this may have been as recently as seventy thousand years ago.) Even if that theory gives way to the Candelabra (multiple racial origins) theory, ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America should simply check the box next to "African-American.
Michael Shermer
I am so tired; all I want to do is sleep. I want to sleep all the day, from dawn until twilight that every evening comes a little earlier and a little more drearily. In the daytime, all I can think about is sleeping. But in the night I do is try to stay awake.
Philippa Gregory
That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences.Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved intothat position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem todevelop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking toomuch havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas tocooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast,humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given timeto adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of theplanet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have ɹlled them withself-conɹdence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator.Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fearsand anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, haveresulted from this over-hasty jump.
Yuval Noah Harari