Quotes by Historians - Page 47

On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.
Andrew Dalby
After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested, namely the geocentric system of the universe. The fact that the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, related to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind. Celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed them of their mysterious prestige.
Franz Cumont
For me and my friends, for people who think the way I do over there, for all ordinary Soviet citizens, America evokes a mixture of admiration and compassion...You're a country of the future, a young country, with yet untapped possiblities, enormous territory, great breadth of spirit, generosity, magnanimity. But these qualities—strength, generosity, and magnanimity—are usually combined in a man and even in a whole country with trustfulness. And this has already done you a disservice several times.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
They became actual revolutions instead of mere discussions, complaints and rioting, only after revolutionists had beaten, or won over, the armed forces of the government
Crane Brinton
You've got to cram it into your thick heads: the sickos that sent us to this place are so stuffed with hate they've got to spew it out on someone, it almost doesn't matter who. If it's not one race, face or religion it'd be another. Right now it's us they vomit on. Next war it'll be some other poor beggars, then some others, then -''I want to go home!' the poor woman gasped, in between shakes and sobs.'And I want to murder every last beast in this hellhole with my bare hands,' Girder raged. She had hands as big as dinner plates. 'The best we can do instead is live. Are you listening? The only way to beat them is by not dying. So shut up and survive, you miserable cow. And let the rest of us sleep.
Lucy Adlington
Once more, I am watching the most powerful men in the kingdom bring their power to bear on a woman who has done nothing worse than live to the beat of her own heart, see with her own eyes; but this is not their tempo nor their vision and they cannot tolerate any other.
Philippa Gregory
He could never be anything more than what he was: the inheritor of weakness and unbridled emotion, a creature possessed by the past, and carrying its curse forever into the future--
John Jakes
History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.
Philip Guedalla
I'm the only English thing they can vent their anger on.
Harold Holzer
People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer--a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer--a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer.
Michael Shermer
Cynicism is humour in ill health.
H.G.Wells
The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
Hippolyte Taine
Is but the threshold of eternity.
Robert Southey
The real regrets in life are the risks you didn't take.
Habeeb Akande
I am not going to let him win, Guillaume. Not this time. I could not keep him from making my mother pay the price for our failed rebellion. Fifteen years she has been his prisoner, fifteen years! And she is his prisoner, for all that she no longer wants for a queen’s comforts. I have had to submit to his demands and subject myself to his whims and endure the indignity of having him brandish the crown before me as he would tease a dog with a bone. But no more. I will not let him rob me of my birthright, and I will not let him keep me from honoring my vow to defend the Holy Land. I do think he is behind that very opportune rebellion in my duchy, and I would not put it past him to be conniving with the Count of Toulouse, either. And if by chance he did not, it is only because he did not think of it. No, a reckoning is long overdue, and we will have it at Bonsmoulins.
Sharon Kay Penman
He had to pause for his usual misgivings.
Paul C. Nagel
Human beings who leave behind them no great achievements, but only a series of small kindnesses, have not had wasted lives
Charlotte Gray
Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.
Jacob Bronowski
He that plants trees loves others besides himself.
Thomas Fuller
Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.
Michael Ignatieff
The only dreams that matter are the ones you have when you're awake.
John O'Callaghan
The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
Arnold Toynbee
Fear if allowed free rein would reduce all of us to trembling shadows of men for whom only death could bring release.
John M. Wilson
One cloud is enough to eclipse all the sun.
Thomas Fuller
Humanists were people who wanted to return to ideas found in old Greek and Latin writing of Greece and Rome, written many centuries earlier. Christian Humanists also wanted to get back to these ideas, but they were mainly concerned with learning about the early Christian Church, before it had become involved with money-making and superstition. They wanted to read the books of the early Church, especially the gospels of Christ, in the original language of Greek, so that they would know exactly what the writings meant. The leader of the Christian Humanists was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who attacked superstitions in the Catholic Church in his writing.
Michael A. Mullett
Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. 'Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow. I have no kindness for you, and know you have as little for me. I will not, therefore, take any pains upon your account; and should I labour with you upon my own account, in expectation of a return, I know I should be disappointed, and that I should in vain depend upon your gratitude. Here then I leave you to labour alone; You treat me in the same manner. The seasons change; and both of us lose our harvests for want of mutual confidence and security.
David Hume
Today everybody is talking about the fact that we live in one world; because of globalization, we are all part of the same planet. They talk that way, but do they mean it? We should remind them that the words of the Declaration [of Independence] apply not only to people in this country, but also to people all over the world. People everywhere have the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When the government becomes destructive of that, then it is patriotic to dissent and to criticize - to do what we always praise and call heroic when we look upon the dissenters and critics in totalitarian countries who dare to speak out.
Howard Zinn
Stopping in the 1970s, "Hybridity" as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the "catastrophic" situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.
Hannah Landecker
Indulge your passion for science…but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Be a philosopher; but amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.
David Hume
Temptations come as a general rule when they are sought.
Margaret Oliphant
The damage and invisible scars of emotional abuse are very difficult to heal, because memories are imprinted on our minds and hearts and it takes time to be restored. Imprints of past traumas do not mean a person cannot change their future beliefs and behaviors. as people, we do not easily forget. However, as we heal, grieve, and let go, we become clear-minded and focused to live restore and emotionally healthy.
Dee Brown
Cronkite was always one step short of disillusionment.
Douglas Brinkley
If only I had thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under-world in a second, and examined it at leisure.
H.G.Wells
The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality.
Arnold Toynbee
In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.
Karl Marx
One can imagine that if humanity suddenly disappeared from the planet, the cat would shrug its shoulders, raise its tail, and return to its forest habitat, there to live as its ancestors have done for two million years, forever in search of something small, furry, and squeaky to play with.
Eric Chaline
Nothing happens unless first we dream.
Carl Sandburg
I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.
Rebecca Solnit
But above all, an author must write passionately and edit passionately.
Paul Collins
How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond oneself. . . . Does scientific explanation of the world diminish its spiritual beauty? I think not. Science and spirituality are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. Anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of spirituality. Science does this in spades. (158-159)
Michael Shermer
nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents.
Alexis de Tocqueville
In actual fact. The manifold sexualities - those which appear with the different ages (sexualities of the infant or the child), those which become fixated on particular tastes or practices (the sexuality of the invert, the gerontophile, the fetishist), those which, in a diffuse manner, invest relationships (the sexuality of doctor and patient, teacher and student, psychiatrist and mental patient), those which haunt spaces (the sexuality of the home, the school, the prison)- all form the correlate of exact procedures of power.
Michel Foucault
The simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind, than all the (investigations) disquisitions of philosophers and than all the exhortations of moralists.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
I just want to this about that.
Steven C. Smith
Centrally planned economies are upended by out of control population. Their escape valve is eugenics.
A.E. Samaan
She counted each second, each moment of life stolen from her, moving her closer to death.
Scott T Goudsward
In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the 21st century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don't know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues.
Yuval Noah Harari
In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.
Barbara W. Tuchman
It is not solely or chiefly in virtue of the divine image that man effectively resembles God, but in virtue of his consciousness of being an image and the movement whereby the soul, passing in a way through itself, avails itself of the factual resemblance in order to attain to God.
Étienne Gilson
Clothes can suggest, persuade, connote, insinuate, or indeed lie, and apply subtle pressure while their wearer is speaking frankly and straightforwardly of other matters.
Anne Hollander
When I am dead, I hope it may be said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
Hilaire Belloc
It is not in life but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.
George Woodcock
Nearly all libertarians were once conservatives or progressives or independent statists of some stripe. But scarcely any conservatives, progressives, or independent statists were once libertarians. This asymmetry in the direction of ideological migration is interesting and perhaps informative.
Robert Higgs
The author relates the progress of inoculation against smallpox in America with the interaction between an African slave named Onisimus whose homeland knew how to treat the malady and and leading clergyman Cotton Mather who was curious and open-minded enough to listen to him.
Robert J. Allison
Peter, who broke his enemies on the rack and hanged them in Red Square, who had his son tortured to death, is Peter the Great. But Nicholas, whose hand was lighter than that of any tsar before him, is "Bloody Nicholas". In human terms, this is irony rich and dramatic, the more so because Nicholas knew what he was called.
Robert K. Massie
Luther’s doctrine of justification depends upon two things: the constant preaching of the wrath of God in the face of sin; and the realization that every Christian is at once righteous and a sinner, thus needing the hammer of the law to terrify and break the sinful conscience.
Carl R. Trueman
Namque pauci libertatem, pars magna iustos dominos volunt.(Few men desire freedom, the greater part desire just masters.)
Sallust
Patriarchy has been the normal in almost all agricultural and industrial societies. ...If patriarchy in Afro-Asia resulted from some chance occurrence, why were the Aztecs and Incas patriarchal? It is far more likely that even though the precise definition of man and woman varies between cultures, there is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is; there are plenty of theories, none of the convincing.
Yuval Noah Harari
The greatest of faults I should say is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle
A fox should not be on the jury at a goose's trial.
Thomas Fuller