Quotes by Historians - Page 59

During my stay in the United States, I witnessed the spontaneous formation of committees in a country for the pursuit and prosecution of a man who had committed a great crime. In Europe, a criminal is an unhappy man who is struggling for his life against the agents of power, whilst the people are merely a spectator of the conflict: in America, he is looked upon as an enemy of the human race, and the whole of mankind is against him.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Past is PrologueThis book was written observing the premise that the seeds of Holocaust denial take root and prosper with misinformation. Clarity and transparency are imperative, as they leave no room for denial theories that would deprive the victims justice, or rob the living of a future. Generations of historians have enthusiastically gone about their craft knowing full well that 'he who owns the past, owns the future'. Improperly documented history, or more precisely, fraudulent versions of history not only deprive the victims of pasts injustices due recognition of their suffering, but also rob the living of a fair chance at a future free from the dangers of repeating past injustices.
A.E. Samaan
And so make life death and that vast forever One grand sweet song.
Charles Kingsley
They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. I say its closer to 675 or 700.
A.E. Samaan
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg
Time and time again, throughout the history of medical practice, what was once considered as "scientific" eventually becomes regarded as "bad practice".
David Stewart
Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear.
H.G.Wells
Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.
Karl Marx
Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility--space itself--to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.
Michel de Certeau
Woe to him who becomes useless to human progress!
Ernest Renan
The political reputation of Servius rests upon his organization of society according to a fixed scale of rank and fortune. He originated the census, a measure of the highest utility to a state destined, as Rome was, to future preeminence; for by means of its public service, in peace as well as in war, could thence forward be regularly organized on the basis of property; every man's contribution could be in proportion to his means.
Livy
If Kindle is upgraded with face recognition and biometric sensors, it can know what made you laugh, what made you sad and what made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.
Yuval Noah Harari
Christ represents originally: 1) men before God; 2) God for men; 3) men to man.Similarly, money represents originally, in accordance with the idea of money: 1) private property for private property; 2) society for private property; 3) private property for society.But Christ is alienated God and alienated man. God has value only insofar as he represents Christ, and man has value only insofar as he represents Christ. It is the same with money.
Karl Marx
A bad peace is worse than war.
Tacitus
The sight of big ships, of the many new uniforms, at once serious and cool, left Bush with an overall sense of the navy's power and camaraderie and purpose.
H.W. Brands
Freedom meant one thing to him—home.But they wouldn't let him go home.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Missiologists have in recent years begun to think seriously about inculturation, and historians have begun to learn from them. When the Christian message is inserted into a cultural framework, if the messengers are insensitive to the local culture the result can be cultural imperialism. On the other hand, if they grant too much hegemony to the local culture, the result at best is 'syncretism' and at worst 'Christo-paganism.' Things are most wholesome when sensitive interchange takes place leading to 'a truly critical symbiosis.' But for this to happen, there must be a second stage - a time of 'pastoral follow-up work,' of catechizing and life formation enabling the new faith to express its genius in the institutions and reflexes of its new host culture.
Alan Kreider
(Taft's mother's) losing her firstborn had convinced her that children are treasures lent not given and that they may be recalled at any time. Parents, she firmly believed, could never love their children too much.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Only danger is real, and difficulty. Yet we live to make our lives safe - and those of others. (..) I will fight my own people to keep them from fighting, for as long as can be. Never fight, until it is unsafe not to fight, unsafe for our souls as well as our bodies. Then fight for their safety, - but when it is won, remember that safety itself is unsafe. For what is safety? It is sleepy thing. It does not make one happy. It does not remind one that it is good to be alive. Life is taken for granted, so it is no longer surprise. It grows dull and monotonous, one lives as a tree or a cabbage or a cow in the straw of the byre. Our forefathers scorned "a straw death". A straw life is worse.
Margaret Irwin
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief. . . and unspeakable love.
Washington Irving
There is no giving advice to a young man so much in love.
Cecil Woodham-Smith
It's freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences and/or ridicule.
A.E. Samaan
...and spend my days surrounded by wise books, - bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.
H.G.Wells
If they are afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth will never be released except by accident.
Barbara W. Tuchman
A teacher affects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Adams
So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs.
H.G.Wells
One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell...
W.E.B. Du Bois
Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity.
Stacy Schiff
We are in the first age since the dawn of civilization in which people have dared to think it practicable to make the benefits of civilization available to the whole human race.
Arnold Toynbee
The term "totalitarian" was derived from Adolf Hitler's "Total State", which was a "craddle to grave" solution that sought to micro-manage all aspects of humanity.
A.E. Samaan
They know they dare not have their stuff stripped down to plain words. These Bishops and parsons with their beloved Christianity are like a man who has poisoned his wife and says her body's too sacred for a post-mortem. Nowadays, by the light we have, any ecclesiastic must be born blind or an intellectual rascal. Don't tell me. The world's had this apostolic succession of oily old humbugs from early Egypt onwards, trying to come it over people. Antiquity's no excuse. A sham is no better for being six thousand years stale. Christianity's no more use to us now thanthe Pyramids.
H.G.Wells
We need not fear God as we fear all other suffering, which burns and maims and kills. For God's fire, though it will perfect us, will not destroy, for 'the bush was not consumed.
Thomas Cahill
Good is not good, where better is expected.
Thomas Fuller
He had been present in their minds not as a man but as an idea.
Barbara W. Tuchman
Conversion is not a single prayer. Conversion is pilgrimage.
Diana Butler Bass
The Loguidice Fitness Equation: Eating Right + Knowing How to Workout + Consistency = Success
Bill Loguidice
One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification. The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
Bernard DeVoto
Any man's life can be seen as a series of engagements with his fathers, Including the surrogates provided by life and literature.
Richard Brookhiser
[W]e are hardened to what we know, and we rationalise and even justify cruelties practised by us and our like while retaining the capacity to be outraged, even disgusted by practices equally cruel which, under the hands of strangers, take a different form.
John Keegan
Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.
Rebecca Solnit
Blessed is he who has found his work let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work a life-purpose. ... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is. ... Even in the meanest sorts of labor the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.
Thomas Carlyle
One of the characteristic problems of our time is how to close this gap between capabilities and foresight.
Edward Tenner
It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans in return for the many devastating epidemic diseases that Indians received from the Old World.
Jared Diamond
The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.
Russell Kirk
But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed.
Andrew Lang
No wild beasts are so deadly to humans as most Christians are to each other.
Ammianus Marcellinus
In peace sons bury their fathers in war fathers bury their sons.
Herodotus
Memorialization is not a passive practice but an active conversation.
Aanchal Malhotra
Big government = oligarchy. Simple equation. Big government = loss of representation.
A.E. Samaan
Soldiers in foreign camps, so far from being missionaries for good, require missionaries themselves, more than the natives. Andrew Carnegie
H.W. Brands
It's madness the sheep to talk peace with the wolf
Thomas Fuller
This was all very well: Columbanus's success indicates the appeal of his mission. But his activities, for the first time, brought the nature of Celtic monasticism firmly to the attention of the Church authorities -- to western bishops in general, and to the Bishop of Rome in particular. The Irish monks were not heretical. But they were plainly unorthodox. They did not look right, to begin with. They had the wrong tonsure. Rome, as was natural, had 'the tonsure of St Peter', that is, a shaven crown. Easterners had the tonsure of St Paul, totally shaven; and if they wished to take up an appointment in the West they had to wait until their rim grew before being invested. But the Celts looked like nothing on earth: they had their hair long at the back and, on the shaven front part, a half-circle of hair from one ear to the other, leaving a band across the forehead.
Paul Johnson
The meek shall indeed inherit the earth. They have the power to act rationally instead of reacting emotionally.
David M. Butcher
To the modern politician and planner, men are the flies of a summer, oblivious of their past, reckless of their future.
Russell Kirk
A good life fears not life nor death.
Thomas Fuller
But I was too restless to watch long; I'm too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours -- that's another matter.
H.G.Wells
The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works, he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverse is, one has an ideological production). The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author…
Michel Foucault
One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.
Peter Marshall
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.
Karl Marx
...the more widely we extend the range of education, the more necessary it is to provide some principle of cohesion to counterbalance the centrifugal tendencies of specialization and utilitarianism.
Christopher Henry Dawson