Quotes by Historians - Page 52

Then, as now, archaelogists and writers ventured where others feared to tread.
Janet Wallach
The difference between one man and another is not mere ability . . . it is energy.
Thomas Arnold
The deceiver loses when there is correct response from the deceived...
Bipan Chandra
Jefferson was ambivalent about executive power – until he bore executive responsibility.
Jon Meacham
The art is not one of forgetting but letting go
Rebecca Solnit
A good woman keeps her mind right and her body tight.
Habeeb Akande
Even now I cannot believe that I am still alive and writing this account of the emperor's death. I put my hands to my eyes, wondering if what I am relating here is not all a dream - or maybe it is not a dream: perhaps it is a delusion and I am mad, the victim of some extraordinary and monstrous hallucination. How comes it that when he is dead I am still numbered among the living?
Anna Comnena
Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.
Michel Foucault
patriotism of many is....a voice and nothing more... A spirit of money-making has eaten up our patriotism. Our morals are more depreciated than our currency.
David Ramsay
Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.
Noam Chomsky
It's not radical Islam that worries the US -- it's independence
Noam Chomsky
The sign of a good novel is what it can cause its reader to see, even if this lies beyond the author's own vision.
John Gaddis
I will forever walk alone in a world overflowing with those that will never understand my meaning of “Learning to See” I’m always teaching myself to see beauty in all aspects of reality, yearning to learn the beauty in others, from their vision of everyday life to their deepest secrets of their dreams. As the sun rises I must smile, smile for those with the beautiful mind and soul. I’m so passionate for the visions I see, and the dreams I wish the world could be.
Michael Jones
This is why I keep telling Ash to get you a cat or a bird. Guns aren't proper pets.
Andrea Cremer
...the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose habitat is vanishing elsewhere, and the gym (and home gym) accommodates the survival of bodies after the abandonment of the original sites of bodily exertion.
Rebecca Solnit
Who is there that in logical words can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that!
Thomas Carlyle
The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
Rebecca Solnit
Atheism certainly promotes a low view of humanity- how much lower can you get than thinking yourself an accidental by-product of a series of even larger accidents!
John Dickson
All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.
Carl Lotus Becker
On Lee as commander: "He had a cheerful dignity and could praise them (his men) without seeming to court their favor.
Shelby Foote
History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man's follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.
will and Ariel Durant
And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx.
H.G.Wells
It is a foolish judge who, before the evidence is presented, makes a judgement.
Peter Tremayne
Finally, Christians were accused of being subversive, for they refused to worship the emperor and thus destroyed the very fiber of society. The apologists answered that it was true that they refused to worship the emperor or any other creature, but that in spite of this they were loyal subjects of the empire. What the emperor needs—they said—is not to be worshiped, but to be served; and those who serve him best are those who pray for him and for the empire to the only true God.
Justo L. González
Fill your mind before you empty your mouth.
Habeeb Akande
Circumstances are the seeds of literature.
Salvador de Madariaga
Technology has become the West’s main prop to its claims of inherent superiority over the non-West, and the reason why the non-West should adopt Western culture. If advanced technology is particular to Western culture, then it is only by Westernizing that the non-West can obtain it. This argument collapses if Western technology can be adopted in isolation from the broader culture, or if other cultures can generate significant technology independently.
Peter A. Lorge
I hope to stand firm enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Amid the war the capitalists were asserting national necessity.
H.W. Brands
We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.
Carl Lotus Becker
But heroes, at times, had to be fools.
Steve Berry
Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once.
David Hume
Print, it transpired, was not just an instrument of agitation and change: now it was equally necessary to win the peace.
Andrew Pettegree
Arrogance is thinking you are above someone else, Confidence is knowing no one is above you.
Habeeb Akande
Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning’s famous poem, ‘The Lost Leader,’ in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us.’ A few more of the poem’s lines were: ‘We shall march prospering, not thro’ his presence; Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre,’ and ‘Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.’ There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai’s photograph!
Bipan Chandra
Stop complaining and start living.
Habeeb Akande
Fatigue could be the dealmaker's friend.
H.W. Brands
The cry for an equality of wages rests, therefore, upon a mistake is an inane wish never to be fulfilled. It is an offspring of that false and superficial radicalism that accepts premises and tries to evade conclusions. Upon the basis of the wages system the value of labouring power is settled like that of every other commodity; and as different kinds of labouring power have different values, or require different quantities of labour for their production, they must fetch different prices in the labour market. To clamour for equal or even equitable retribution on the basis of the wages system is the same as to clamour for freedom on the basis of the slavery system. What you think just or equitable is out of the question. The question is: What is necessary and unavoidable with a given system of production? After what has been said, it will be seen that the value of labouring power is determined by the value of the necessaries required to produce, develop, maintain, and perpetuate the labouring power.
Karl Marx
Perhaps I am a man of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all.
H.G.Wells
If anyone, no matter who, were given the opportunity of choosing from amongst all the nations in the world the set of beliefs which he thought best, he would inevitably—after careful considerations of their relative merits—choose that of his own country. Everyone without exception believes his own native customs, and the religion he was brought up in, to be the best.
Herodotus
It's just men and ants. There's the ants builds their cities,live their lives, have wars, revolutions, until men want them out of the way, and then they go out of the way. That's what we are now _ just ants.
H.G.Wells
In victory even the cowardly like to boast while in adverse times even the brave are discredited.
Sallust
To exist, the triangle demands three complementary elements: love, power and danger. Mixed incautiously, these elements, like those in physics, are volatile and potentially explosive.
Ruth Harris
They had gathered at Eastcheap to wait. At this time of day, the marketplace ought to have been thronged with people looking for bargains, moving from stall to stall, examining the fresh fish, choosing the plumpest hens, buying candles and pepper and needles. The stalls were open, but the fishmongers and cordwainers and butchers were doing no business, despite the growing crowd. The sun was hot, flies were thick, and the odors pungent; no one complained, though. They talked and gossiped among themselves, strangers soon becoming friends, for the normally fractious and outspoken Londoners had forgotten their differences, at least for a day, united in a common purpose and determined to revel in their triumph, for they were pragmatic enough to understand this might be their only one. Now they joked and swapped rumors and waited with uncommon patience, and at last they heard a cry, swiftly picked up and echoed across the marketplace: “She is coming!
Sharon Kay Penman
Disappointments are to the soul what a thunder-storm is to the air.
Friedrich von Schiller
Haslam leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to make of Matthews' mental world: this is gibberish and nothing more.
Mike Jay
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.
David Hume
What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.
Wallace Stegner
A religious person without no job is a dead person. (Iigbagbo ti koni ise oku ni. - Yoruba proverb)
Habeeb Akande
I will now sing another song for your pleasure. Now, if you like Phil Collins...you should be shot in the head.
Robert Clark
Pride perceiving humility honourable often borrows her cloak.
Thomas Fuller
No other woman had that air of spring in January, that ever-bubbling fount of love and hope.
Rosalind Miles
Laughter can be more satisfying than honor more precious than money more heart-cleansing than prayer.
Harriet Rochlin
I’m less interested in proselytizing or a bigger tent for its own sake than in issues of human flourishing. What are the best conditions in which people live and flourish? It’s more the, How do we get along? What does it mean for living now?
Karen L. King
You can cover a great deal of country in books.
Andrew Lang
Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.
Rick Perlstein
Here hath been dawning another blue day: think wilt thou let it slip useless away?
Thomas Carlyle
The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distance of infinity.
James Gleick
A lot of people here some South in your mouth, and they automatically think you're dumb. They think if you talk funny, you are funny. – Lloyd Hand
David Pietrusza
It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn