Quotes by Historians - Page 55

He howled in despair as his body was enveloped by a terrifying and sickening darkness.
Alan Kinross
People don't always want to be with people. It gets tiring.
Emma Donoghue
Historians are lenient to those who succeed and stern to those who fail; in this, and this alone, they display strong political sense.
J. Christopher Herold
Giving a woman your whole life is meaningless without giving her your whole heart as well.
Deborah Harkness
Hunting, bathing, gaming, laughing: that's living (venari lavare ludere ridere occest vivere).
Mary Beard
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
Karl Marx
Of Teddy Roosevelt and his siblings, the author writes they were, "armed with an innate curiosity and discipline fostered by his remarkable father.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Fascist utopia, like that of the Communists, was false, and generated immense suffering. But there were those who dreamed it sincerely.
Norman Davies
All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
as was his way, once he acknowledged the problem, he set about finding a means to resolve it
Sharon Kay Penman
Rules, whether they govern sexual morality or financial probity, regardless of whether they are justifiable or undesirable, always provoke bold recalcitrants to devise clever, defiant ways to breach them.
Richard Davenport-Hines
Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.
Jared Diamond
The true friend . . . knows that you need him in that very moment –not tomorrow, not next week. By next week you may happy, or you may be dead.
Suzanne Massie
Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.
Theodore Roszak
Beware of critics of education who cloak their desire to protect privilege (and inequality) in the garb of educational reform.
Michael S. Roth
Beaten armies always shout, "TREASON!
John Taliaferro
...education has always meant the initiation of the young into the social and spiritual inheritance of the community: in other words, education has meant the transmission of culture.
Christopher Henry Dawson
Jefferson determined the lodestar that lay hidden in the motivations of others
John Ferling
[The public school system is] usually a twelve year sentence of mind control.Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism andcompromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting itinstead into meek subservience to authority.
Walter Karp
Jackson lead as he lived, sometimes with his heart, sometimes with his mind, sometimes with both.
Jon Meacham
The free worker receives a wage; the slave an education, food, care, clothing; the money that the master spends to keep the slave is drained little by little and in detail; one hardly perceives it.1
Alexis de Tocqueville
The author distinguishes George Washington's leadership from that of another aristocratic general whose temperament was somewhat cold. Unlike him, Washington made the effort to at least appear to suffer with his troops.
John Ferling
Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.
Wallace Stegner
Good is not good where better is expected.
Thomas Fuller
Lincoln told a family friend that his father taught him to work, but never learned him to love it.
Richard Brookhiser
To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.
Richard Brookhiser
Seventy years I regard as the limit of the life of man. In these seventy years are contained, without reckoning intercalary months, twenty-five thousand and two hundred days. Add an intercalary month to every other year, that the seasons may come round at the right time, and there will be, besides the seventy years, thirty-five such months, making an addition of one thousand and fifty days. The whole number of the days contained in the seventy years will thus be twenty-six thousand two hundred and fifty, whereof not one but will produce events unlike the rest. Hence man is wholly accident.
Herodotus
Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.
Timothy Snyder
But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.
Rebecca Solnit
Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. (38)
Michael Shermer
The one who cannot see your vision will be blinded by your mission.
Habeeb Akande
Good work, like good talk or any other form of worthwhile human relationship, depends upon being able to assume an extended shared world.
Stefan Collini
When the flames of life are gnawing away at your butt, run faster, quicker, and harder than you've ever run before, because I guarantee it that life will condition you, harder than any trainer ever will.When you state to yourself with the utter most believe, “I will achieve this,” than you are on the path, and this is when life throws obstacles left, right, straight on and which other way, but keep going. Because you will make it
Mark Donnelly
I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to carry on a miniature flirtation.
H.G.Wells
Valiant! The word mocked me, for I knew myself to be anything but valiant. What I had done, I had done in a fit of insane bitterness, not with cool courage, not with brave quick thinking, not with presence of mind - but with absence of it.
Kenneth Roberts
Women who seek advice from single women about getting a man is like asking a homeless man how to be rich.
Habeeb Akande
We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.
Rebecca Solnit
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.", July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)
David McCullough
Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen!
W.E.B. Du Bois
I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.
Mircea Eliade
The difference between one man and another is not mere ability ... it is energy.
Thomas Arnold
We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.' We think we are most ourselves when we are most passionate, whereas it is then we are most passive, caught in some ancestral torrent of impulse or feeling, and swept on to a precipitate reaction which meets only part of the situation because without thought only part of a situation can be perceived.
Will Durant
Institutions or products of culture. But they formalize a set of norms.
Niall Ferguson
Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.
Russell Kirk
There is a kind of counter-criticism that seeks to expand the work of art, by connecting it, opening up its meanings, inviting in the possibilities. A great work of criticism can liberate a work of art, to be seen fully, to remain alive, to engage in a conversation that will not ever end but will instead keep feeding the imagination. Not against interpretation, but against confinement, against the killing of the spirit. Such criticism is itself a great art.This is a kind of criticism that does not pit the critic against the text, does not seek authority. It seeks instead to travel with the work and its ideas, to invite it to blossom and invite others into a conversation that might have previously seemed impenetrable, to draw out relationships that might have been unseen and open doors that might have been locked. This is a kind of criticism that respects the essential mystery of a work of art, which is in part its beauty and its pleasure, both of which are irreducible and subjective. The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.
Rebecca Solnit
The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.
Rebecca Solnit
A wise man turns chance into good fortune.
Thomas Fuller
Achieving a goal is nothing. The getting there is everything.
Jules Michelet
War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.
Edward Gibbon
The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes
Yuval Noah Harari
The French political class has been relentlessly myopic, if not completely blind, about the concerns of those who work and mine and farm. .... To cite Eugene Weber, "One thing that we learn from history is that people seldom learn from history.
Ronald Rosbottom
From the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit. Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader at every turn. It is humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries, and that millions of men are still wasting time in absorbing it." (Orpheus, Salmon Reinach, 1932. See page 175 of the book here)
Salomon Reinach
Beneath the eerie calm of these unfathomable waters were deadly whirlpools of ambition, anger and unhappiness.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Henry Adams observes that John Hay has the ability to take the world as a whole rather than pulling it to pieces in criticism. He also observes that, in the routine of a stressful job, this perspective is challenged
John Taliaferro
In the Balkans the peasants say that if you long for faraway countries and leave your own land and home to find them, you are born under A LILAC-BLEEDING STAR.
Lesley Blanch
Show me you care about our common tongue. Bring to your [writing] passion, deeply informed by knowledge of your subject. Stay me, not with apples and flagons, but with wit and grace, humor and intense caring about your discipline. Don't slack, don't give it a lick and a promise, don't make it evident that you posted what was 'good enough for government work,' don't try and fake it. Give it your best, your all, not for pence, but for the love of the craft. Do these things, as these writers and scores I have not named do, bring to your work your self, your heart, your voice, motherly or youthful, lawyerly or priestly, conservative or liberal, it matters not. Do this and I and hundreds of others will return again and again to your work, not merely because we may have a burning need for a new printer or an abiding interest in college newspapers or what have you, but because we wish to spend time with your mind and voice.
Markham Shaw Pyle
I am, apparently, of that rare breed that likes to write. The demands of a chapter pull me from bed in the morning, and regardless of how well I think I know the day's road ahead, there are always surprises. But the pleasures that come from writing about the American past, of discovering what I hope no one has seen before, are of course balanced by rough, often tedious stretches. Writing does not come easily for me; I work slowly, much like a sculptor with a chisel, only words rather than stone or wood are my medium. But when at the end of the day I have a page or two that seem right, I pull away from the desk certain that all is right in the world, regardless of what the evening news might tell me later.
David Freeman Hawke
Art was the first casualty of the Socialist and Communist revolutions of the 20th Century. Socialists killed the independent thinkers first.
A.E. Samaan
The foundation of wisdom is knowing how to tell when you are totally clueless, lost, and in need of assistance.
A.E. Samaan