Quotes by Historians - Page 63

The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of "perversions." Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.
Michel Foucault
Emma Willard told the legislature that the education of women "has been too exclusively directed to fit them for displaying to advantage the charms of youth and beauty" The problem, she said, was that "the taste of men, whatever it might happen to be, has made into a standard for the formation of the female character." Reason and religion teach us, she said, that "we too are primary existences...not the satellites of men.
Howard Zinn
Monsters’ can help us by giving a tangible form to our secret fears. It is less widely appreciated today that ‘wonders’ such as the unicorn legitimize our hopes. But all imaginary animals, to some degree all animals, are ultimately both monsters and wonders, which assist us by deflecting and absorbing our uncertainties . It is hard to tell ‘imaginary animals’ from symbolic, exemplary, heraldic, stylized, poetic, literary, or stereotypical ones. What is reality? Until we answer that question with confidence, a sharp differentiation between real animals and imaginary ones will remain elusive. There is some yeti in every ape, and a bit of Pegasus in every horse. Men and women are not only part angel and part demon, as the old cliché goes; they are also part centaur, part werewolf, part mandrake, and part sphinx.
Boria Sax
But it is hazardous and, I believe, counterproductive to become frozen in time by an obsession with past wrongs and errors.
George S. McGovern
Whereas Taft discouraged the young Yale student from extracurricular reading, fearful it would detract from required courses, Roosevelt read widely yet managed to stand near the top of his class. The breath of his numerous interests allowed him to draw on knowledge across various disciplines, from zoology in philosophy and religion, from poetry and drama to history and politics.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
The difference between greed and ambition is a greedy person desires things he isn't prepared to work for.
Habeeb Akande
We have the right to demand that if we find men against whom there is not only suspicion, but almost a certainty that they have had collusion with men whose interests were in conflict with the interests of the public, they shall, at least, be required to bring positive facts with which to prove there has not been such collusion; and they ought themselves to have been the first to demand such an investigation." -Teddy Roosevelt
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.
Shelby Foote
Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.
Noam Chomsky
Do you ever think that people who find it tougher to say what they're feeling are the ones who feel things more intensely? As if they're the ones who really understand what it means to love someone? As if they have to keep their defenses high, because they care too much and have too much to lose?
Claire Cross
He that hath the name to be an early riser may sleep till noon.
James Howell
Dear Artie: “The young fellow has disappeared into a dead end. I think the long-necked bastard planned to wind up in Paris and sent him there but he may also have used the underground railroad. Ask your round-heeled contact. Maybe you can find more than I could. “Roy
John Pearce
People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.
Noam Chomsky
But remember. Just because you don't believe in something doesn't mean it isn't real.
Katherine Howe
The danger of growing up surrounded by these endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them, but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way.
Bee Wilson
Those activities of an earlier day, furthermore, provided opportunities for cooperative action toward a common goal and for a sense of accomplishment that was not readily available to a modern technological society. For the 'city-bred child of today' (p. 21), such opportunities were no longer present, and the educational problem then became one of recreating in the school something of the occupations that in former times not only provided a sense of real purpose, but linked intelligence and cooperative action to what the work of the world required.
Herbert M. Kliebard
...moderate your desire of producing perfection, temper your eagerness to produce faultless performance...and soften your manners towards those who are subordinate to you...
Cecil Woodham-Smith
I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors. The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults or remove the prejudices which are imbibed against him.
Ron Chernow
The politics of the possible was being replaced by the politics of purity.
H.W. Brands
The assertion that there are an infinite number of homosexualities is a political statement rather than an observable fact.
Rictor Norton
Democracy is a cry of war; it is the flag of the party of numbers placed below raised against those above. A flag sometimes raised in the name of the rights of men, but sometimes in the name of crude passions; sometimes raised against the most iniquitous usurpations but also sometimes against legitimate superiority.
François Guizot
Our work is the presentation of our capabilities.
Edward Gibbon
That vice has often proved an emancipator of the mind, is one of the most humiliating, but, at the same time, one of the most unquestionable facts in history.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
The crash did not cause the Depression: that was part of a far broader malaise. What it did was expose the weaknesses that underpinned the confidence and optimism of the 1920s - poor distribution of income, a weak banking structure and insufficient regulations, the economy's dependence on new consumer goods, the over-extension of industry and the Government's blind belief that promoting business interests would make America uniformly prosperous.
Lucy Moore
Self-government is our right," [Roger Casement] declared. "A thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself - than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers, or to love our kind. . . . Where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours. . . then surely it is braver, a saner and a truer thing, to be a rebel . . . than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men.
Adam Hochschild
Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences
Piero Scaruffi
When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.
Philippa Gregory
Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.
W.E.B. Du Bois
It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men.
Thucydides
Without world unification the species would destroy itself by the enlarged powers that had come to it. This, said the men of science, is no theory, no political alternative; it is a statement of fact. Men had to pool their political, economic and educational lives. There was no other way for them but a series of degenerative phases leading very plainly to extinction. They could not revert now. They had to go on — up or down. They had gone too far with civilisation and in societies, to sink back into a merely “animal” life again. The hold of the primates on life had always been a precarious one. Except where they were under human protection all the other great apes were extinct. Now plainly man had to go on to a larger life, a planetary existence, or perish in his turn.
H.G.Wells
I made the exhilarating discovery that study, when it is pursued with ardour and discipline, becomes creation.
W.K. Hancock
There are three lessons I would write-Three words, as with a burning pen, In tracings of eternal light,Upon the heart of men.Have hope! though clouds environ round,And gladness hides her face in scorn,Put thou the shadow from thy brow,No night but hath its morn.Have love! not love alone for one, But man as man thy brother call,And scatter like the circling sun,Thy charities on all.
Friedrich Schiller
The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.
Stephen E. Ambrose
It is only when women start to organize in large numbers that we become a political force, and begin to move towards the possibility of a truly democratic society in which every human being can be brave, responsible, thinking and diligent in the struggle to live at once freely and unselfishly. Such a democracy would be communism, and is beyond our present imagining.
Sheila Rowbotham
If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.
Joseph J. Ellis
The marketplace is an institution that teaches self-advancement, private acquisition, and the domination of nature. Its way of thinking is incompatible with the round river. Ecological harmony is a nonmarket value that takes a collective will to achieve.
Donald Worster
No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind
Karl Marx
When I opened the curtains in the morning I saw the intersection of two six-lane highways. It was a comfortable, well equipped, practical sort of place, as Holidays Inns tend to be. You can be happy at a place like this so long as you stay away from the coffee. And the restaurant, if you want to be sure. Perhaps not happy, but not unhappy. Or if unhappy, at least not threatened. A good motel creates a kind of stasis for the soul in transit. One should leave no worse than one arrived: that is the minimum requirement.
Don Watson
I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.
Karen Armstrong
Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.
Jill Lepore
The sea is a body in a thousand ways that don't add up, because adding is too stable a transaction for that flux, but the waves come in in a roar and then ebb, almost silent but for the faint suck of sand and snap of bubbles, over and over, a heartbeat rhythm, the sea always this body turned inside out and opened to the sky, the body always a sea folded in on itself, a nautical chart folded into a paper cup.
Rebecca Solnit
In running over the pages of our history for seven hundred years, we shall scarcely find a single great event which has not promoted equality of condition. The Crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided their possessions: the municipal corporations introduced democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post-office brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune, and led obscure adventurers to wealth and power.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Say yes,’ he whispers. ‘Marry me.’I hesitate. I open my eyes. ‘You will get my fortune,’ I remark. ‘When I marry you, everything I have becomes yours. Just as George has everything that belongs to Isabel.’‘That’s why you can trust me to win it for you,’ he says simply. ‘When your interests and mine are the same, you can be certain that I will care for you as for myself. You will be my own. You will find that I care for my own.’‘You will be true to me?’‘Loyalty is my motto. When I give my word, you can trust me.
Philippa Gregory
Connection" was the cement of the governing class.
Barbara W. Tuchman
People move around so much in the world, things get lost.
Emma Donoghue
Let us banish fear. We have been in this mental state for three centuries. I am a radical. I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me.
Carter G. Woodson
Provision for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life.
Woodrow Wilson
Events of great consequence often spring from trifling circumstances.
Livy
The person who expects to understand history must submerge himself in it, must get rid of patriotism, as well as bitterness. And especially in studying a historic life that consists in insecurity must the historian rid himself of all insecurity. He must accept the totality of the data in all their fullness, the noble with the paltry, thinking of how the two interlock.
Américo Castro
There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own.They are the lordly ones! They come in all colors.They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists.They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor.They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists.They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humor and understanding.When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically.They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean.They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion, or political correctness.They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it.It is the nation of nowhere.
Jan Morris
the crucial factor in ourconquest of the world was our ability to connect many humans to one another.
Yuval Noah Harari
Experience is the extract of suffering.
Arthur Helps
Madness is part of all of us all the time and it comes and goes waxes and wanes.
Otto Friedrich
History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.
Carter G. Woodson
The "norm" for humanity is love.Brutality is an aberration.We are not sinners by nature.We learn to be bad.We are taught to stray from our good paths.We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy.
Jack D. Forbes
While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy, so agreeable to the natural vanity and curiosity of men; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.
David Hume
There are only three colors ten digits and seven notes it's what we do with them that's important.
Ruth Ross
The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists," as one feminist explained.
Jill Lepore
I knew, as soon as I woke up, that the dream had come from God and it was about the reality of Jesus. The truth of Him. The He was a person whose pronouns you had to capitalize. That He was God.
Lauren F. Winner