Quotes by Historians - Page 66

Sadly enough, individual liberty remains the ideal of revolutionary thinkers even in the 21st Century.
A.E. Samaan
For the most part people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe.
H.G.Wells
For tolerance (and you must remember this when you grow older), is of very recent origin and even the people of our own so-called "modern world" are apt to be tolerant only upon such matters as do not interest them very much.
Hendrik Willem van Loon
I did not want to appear before the world as pathetic, deprssed, and psychologically ill. So I erected a barrier of words and wit around myself, so that nobody could see how needy I really was.
Karen Armstrong
Treachery though at first very cautious in the end betrays itself.
Livy
But, as I say, I was toofull of excitement and (a true saying, though those who have neverknown danger may doubt it) too desperate to die.
H.G.Wells
We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children
Howard Zinn
During the persecutions under the Emperor Domitian, John was summoned to Rome, where he was tortured by immersion in a pot of boiling oil and subsequently banished to the island of Patmos in the Aegean sea. It was there he wrote his Apocalypse. It was only after the death of Domitian, in A.D. 96, that he returned to Ephesus, where he was still living during the reign of the Emperor Trajan (A.D. 98-117). He became so old and frail that he could no longer walk and had to be carried to meetings and services. All he could manage to say was, "My little children, love one another." He repeated this over and over.
Gilles Quispel
The real struggle for us is for the citizen to cease to be the property of the state.
Adam Michnik
The head of Goldwater's California operation "what was so uncomfortable around people that he worked up a routine to deal with employees with whom he was forced to share an elevator: "Taken your vacation yet?" he would ask when they entered; answer took just long enough to deliver him to his fourth-floor office.
Rick Perlstein
So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.
Margaret George
Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!
Hilaire Belloc
The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.
Bede
One of the many difficult things about women was that they tended to pick the most unsuitable times to tell you something they considered to be important, and then became irrationally upset when you failed to remember it.
Ruth Downie
The Shah "had traveled to Europe and had been fascinated by the march of progress he observed there. But, once back in Terhan, this fascination had not been translated into sustained Persian modernization, but rather dissipated in the Shah's intense but short-lived passion for the latest novelties. "He is continually taking up and pushing some new scheme or invention which, when the caprice has been gratified, is neglected or allowed to expire".
Charles Emmerson
Man’s collective mastery of nature— even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion— can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well- being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life.
Christopher Lasch
And since a more convincing argument could not be found—aside from a fatal accident or suicide—this way was chosen: a process of galloping senescence.
Mircea Eliade
History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.
Bruce Catton
...ducks and geese are foolish things, and must be looked after, but girls can take care of themselves.
Washington Irving
One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed "God knows which was right.
Carl Sandburg
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
James Gleick
Sports, Politics and Technology. All the same game.
George Shirk
...the experience of battle forever divides those who talk of nothing else but its prospect from those who talk of everything else but its memory.
James D. Hornfischer
The faithful clamoured to be buried alongside the martyrs, as close as possible to the venerable remains, a custom which, in anthropological terms, recalls Neolithic beliefs that certain human remains possessed supernatural properties. It was believed that canonized saints did not rot, like lesser mortals, but that their corpses were miraculously preserved and emanated an odour of sanctity, a sweet, floral smell, for years after death. In forensic terms, such preservation is likely to be a result of natural mummification in hot, dry conditions.
Catharine Arnold
Eleanor Roosevelt on the changes in John F. Kennedy that led her to drop her opposition to his nomination for president: "He has the qualities of a scholar, and a sense of history. I had the feeling that he was the man who can learn. I like him better than I ever had before because he seemed so little caulk-sure, and I think he has a mind that is open to new ideas.
David Pietrusza
Youths should study,' grumbled the Old Woman, 'and not take the laws apart. And you, dear Youth, before you become acquainted with the Beautiful Woman, take a good look into her Garden through the window tomorrow morning, when everything is clearly and genuinely visible in the light of the sun. You will see that in the Garden there are no flowers which are familiar to anyone here, and only such flowers as none of us in the City know. Just think about this carefully, after all, there is something strange about it. The devil is cunning; is this not his creation for the damnation of people?'("The Poison Garden")
Valery Bryusov
We have begun a fight that it may be will take many a generation to complete...but you know that men are not put into this world to go the path of ease; they are put into this world to go the path of pain and struggle...We have given our lives to the enterprise, and that is richer and the moral is greater.
Woodrow Wilson
Nixon was by nature a excluder. Halderman like to exclude people. When Nixon's need met Halderman's abilities, you had the most perfect formula for disaster. – Jim Shepley
David Pietrusza
The world is ruled only by consideration of advantages.
Friedrich von Schiller
Lincoln bore down or anything he handled, mastering both the details and the principles.
Richard Brookhiser
...I believe that nothing that once was can be completely undone. Even if destroyed in the material world and forgotten by men, it remains and will remain alive in the memory of an infinite being for which the past as well as the future is always present, and that is thus the greatest, the only true historian, and the keeper of the eternal tradition of which even our best human traditions ...are but shadows and images.
Paul Oskar Kristeller
One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.
Thomas Carlyle
And tonight Mary could taste bitterness going down like a nut, settling in her stomach. It planted itself, put down roots, and began to grow, nourished on her dark blood.
Emma Donoghue
One of the regrets of my life is that I did not study Latin. I'm absolutely convinced, the more I understand these eighteenth century people, that it was that grounding in Greek and Latin that gave them their sense of the classic virtues: the classic ideals of honor, virtue, the good society, and their historic examples of what they could try to live up to.
David McCullough
Great wealth can make a man no happier than moderate means, unless he has the luck to continue in propsperity to the end. Many very rich men have been unfortunate, and many with a modest competence have had good luck. The former are better off than the latter in two respects only, whereas the poor but lucky man has the advantage in many ways; for though the rich have the means to satisfy their appetites and to bear calamities, and the poor have not, the poor, if they are lucky, are more likely to keep clear of trouble, and will have besides the blessings of a sound body, health, freedom from trouble, fine children, and good looks.Now if a man thus favoured died as he has lived, he will be just the one you are looking for: the only sort of person who deserves to be called happy. But mark this: until he is dead, keep the word “happy” in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky.
Herodotus
How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII
Barbara W. Tuchman
We are to turn our backs for a space upon the insistent examination of the thing that is, and face towards the freer air, the ampler spaces of the thing that perhaps might be.
H.G.Wells
Actually, Bush, technically speaking, is not really President-because he refused to take the Oath of Office. I don’t know how many of you noticed this, but the wording of the Oath of Office is written in the Constitution, so you can’t fool around with it-and Bush refused to read it. The Oath of Of­fice says something about, ”I promise to do this, that, and the other thing,” and Bush added the words, ”so help me God.” Well, that’s illegal: he’s not President, if anybody cares.
Noam Chomsky
... but I must reluctantly observe that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.
Edward Gibbon
When someone calls you a 'nigger', then you feel sorry for him... You have to pity him because his mind has such a sorry way of expressing itself.
Adam Makos
One of George H. W. Bush's early teachers at Andover wrote, "At the moment he is intellectually immature for his powers of reasoning are not entirely developed.
H.W. Brands
There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities such as More Bacon Grotius Pascal Cromwell Bossuet Montesquieu Jefferson Napoleon Pitt etc. The result would be an Encyclopedia of Errors.
Lord Acton
But I am beginning to understand about the dignity and the art of wigs and the makeup. This small, everyday attentiveness of eyebrow pencils is perhaps a picture of the very sort of bodily care our embodied God would have us cultivate, weather in illness or wellness, whether our bodies are in the throes of ecstasy or the throes of pain.
Lauren F. Winner
For 70 years Democrats bitterly denied being "socialists". Bernie Sanders has done the service of exposing them.
A.E. Samaan
When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions.
Friedrich Schiller
But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
It may be that the voice of the people is the voice of God 51 times out of 100. But the remaining 49 times, it is the voice of the devil, or worse, the voice of a fool. Theodore Roosevelt
H.W. Brands
Robin Hood or my Robyn Hood - a legendary character known throughout the world. Why? Essentially the character is on the side of the poor, the oppressed, those who live in a society with very limited recourse to justice. Hence the attraction of an heroic figure who identifies with the poor and the needy and has the courage and ability to solve the problems. Often at the point of an arrow or sword? Why not. That gives the hero character an adventurous dimension to their actions.
John Reynolds
The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.
Edmund S. Morgan
Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
Michel Foucault
At the root of everything lay the passionatedesire of thinking people to find a simple, unifying norm for society like the law of gravity that Newton had found for nature.
James H. Billington
On the Russian revolutionaries:To leave your parents, faithful and loyal subjects of the Emperor, to leave your profession, to desist from having children, to lose your fortune, and to give up your civil honor, all for revolutionary conviction, makes for a league of more practical proof than any religious order.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy.
Catherine Bailey
Who stole the livery of the court of Heaven To serve the Devil in.
Frederick Pollock
The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
Henry Adams
The intellectually-inclined biographers stray from the point that the message is directed through the spoken word at the broad masses and not writing to an inbred, self-adoring intellectual e
Russel H.S. Stolfi
His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. George Bernard Shaw
Barbara W. Tuchman
All the money anyone needs is just enough to prevent one from being a burden to others. -Bishop Milton Wright
David McCullough
All work and no play will make you sad and grey!
Habeeb Akande
The final greatness of the presidency lies in the truth that it is not just an office of incredible power but a breeding ground of indestructible myth.
Clinton Rossiter