Quotes by Historians - Page 67

If it were possible for any nation to fathom another people's bitter experience through a book, how much easier its future fate would become and how many calamities and mistakes it could avoid. But it is very difficult. There always is this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.'Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Respect can only be given to those who have earned it by working for it.
Habeeb Akande
In January in Northern Russia, everything vanishes beneath a deep blanket of whiteness. Rivers, fields, trees, roads, and houses disappear, and the landscape becomes a white sea of mounds and hollows. On days when the sky is gray, it is hard to see where earth merges with air. On brilliant days when the sky is a rich blue, the sunlight is blinding, as if millions of diamonds were scattered on the snow, refracting light. In Catherine's time, the log roads of summer were covered with a smooth coating of snow and ice that enabled the sledges to glide smoothly at startling speeds; on some days, her procession covered a hundred miles.
Robert K. Massie
The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
Henry Adams
My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.
Noam Chomsky
Let only the young come, Says the sea. Let them kiss my face And hear me. I am the last word And I tell Where storms and stars come from.
Carl Sandburg
Whoever gossips to you will gossip of you"; "It is easier to be critical than correct"- avoid criticism about other officers, and never vent destructive criticism of your service, your unit, or your superiors.
Kenneth W. Estes
I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argue, was American treatment of the Opium War, the objective importance of which was not nearly so great as we—and an almost unanimous corps of Chinese historians—have imagined.
Paul A. Cohen
He had read Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry.
H.G.Wells
To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it.
Tacitus
Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.
Northcote Parkinson
I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.
Edward Everett Hale
Only remember this: to seek justice is a good and noble thing, to seek revenge out of hatred is something that wiil devour your very soul.
James Mace
Experience is the best of schoolmasters only the school-fees are heavy.
Thomas Carlyle
The obvious difficulty that has prevented the study of European culture becoming a part of the regular curriculum of studies is its vastness and its complexity. The great advantage of classical education was the fact that it involved the study of only two languages and two literatures and histories. But European culture has produced about twenty vernacular literatures, and its history is spread out among an even larger number of political communities. At first sight it is an unmanageable proposition and we can understand how educationalists have so often come to acquiesce in a cultural nationalism which at least saved them from being overwhelmed by a multiplicity of strange tongues and unknown literatures. But the true method, it seems to me, is rather to find the consitutive factors of the European community and to make them the basis of our study.This means reversing the traditional nationalist approach which concentrated the student's attention on the distinctive characteristics of the national cultures and disregarded or passed lightly over the features that they shared in common. It means also that we should have to devote much more attention to the religious development, since it was in religion that Europe found its original basis of unity.
Christopher Henry Dawson
Regulated" rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government.
A.E. Samaan
It was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline that good soldier should dread his own officers far more than the enemy
Edward Gibbon
As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.
Michael Shermer
All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Teach don't preach!
Habeeb Akande
There was one question, however, which Inciarte had asked him and he could not answer. Why was it that he had lived while others had died? What purpose had God in making this selection? What sense could be made out of it? ‘None,’ replied Father Andrés. ‘There are times when the will of God cannot be understood by our human intelligence. There are things which in all humility we must accept as a mystery.
Piers Paul Read
A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.
Thomas Carlyle
Now, a third and final trait, one which, in my eyes, best describes socialists of all schools and shades, is a profound opposition to personal liberty and scorn for individual reason, a complete contempt for the individual. They unceasingly attempt to mutilate, to curtail, to obstruct personal freedom in any and all ways. They hold that the State must not only act as the director of society, but must further be master of each man, and not only master, but keeper and trainer. [“Excellent.”] For fear of allowing him to err, the State must place itself forever by his side, above him, around him, better to guide him, to maintain him, in a word, to confine him. They call, in fact, for the forfeiture, to a greater or less degree, of human liberty, [Further signs of assent.] to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom.
Tocqueville
I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.
Rebecca Solnit
The practice which obtains amongst the Americans of fixing the standard of their judgment in themselves alone, leads them to other habits of mind. As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of the understanding. Thus they fall to denying what they cannot comprehend; which leaves them but little faith for whatever is extraordinary, and an almost insurmountable distaste for whatever is supernatural.
Alexis de Tocqueville
He that will not sail till all dangers are over must never put to sea.
Thomas Fuller
Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.
Andrew Lang
Go for the hum.
Ethan Mordden
With the compelling convincingness of dreams, which are vague yet exact, the ghost voice draws us (to ourselves and all of our component selves), lifts them casually out of the well of the past--the well wherein nothing is lost, the deep well of forgetfulness, and remembrance--and tosses them mockingly on the glassy table surface of our consciousness. There we are forced to consider them. There we are forced to regard, analyze, and re-understand.
Heinrich Robert Zimmer
Any life truly lived is a risky business and if one puts up too many fences against the risks one ends by shutting out life itself.
Kenneth S. Davis
There are times when we stop, we sit still. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.
James Carroll
If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.
Herbert Butterfield
Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous.
Barbara W. Tuchman
Comparison more than reality makes men happy or wretched.
Thomas Fuller
Statism is political fashion.Individual liberty is eternal.
A.E. Samaan
Western farmers were individualists cheifly in their dreams.
H.W. Brands
Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.
Thomas Carlyle
Oh, miraculous chameleon, science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith! What cult ever battered by this world of doubt can help but envy you?
Ada Palmer
In America, applause is won only by physical exertion.
David McCullough
In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so swiftly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on and uninhabited planet.
William L. Shirer
I think, ladies and gentlemen, and I particularly address those of you who have a socialist outlook, that we should at least permit this socialist economy to prove its superiority. Let's allow it to show that it is advanced, that it is omnipotent, that it has defeated you, that it has overtaken you. Let us not interfere with it. Let us stop selling to it and giving it loans. If it's all that powerful, then let it stand on its own feet for ten or fifteen years. Then we will see what it looks like. I can tell you what it will look like. I am being quite serious now. When the Soviet economy will no longer be able to deal with everything, it will have to reduce its military preparations. It will have to abandon the useless space effort and it will have to feed and clothe its own people. And the system will be forced to relax. Thus, all I ask of you is that as long as this Soviet economy is so proud, so flourishing, and yours is so rotten and so moribund—stop helping it. When has a cripple ever helped along an athlete?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Be strong within ones self, but never forget where ones true strength comes from.
Jean Williams
The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.
David McCullough
There has always been, and there is now, a profound conflict of interest between the people and the government of the United States.
Howard Zinn
Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.
James Gleick
In [the] early days, Muslims did not see Islam as a new, exclusive religion but as a continuation of the primordial faith of the ‘People of the Book’, the Jews and Christians. In one remarkable passage, God insists that Muslims must accept indiscriminately the revelations of every single one of God’s messengers: Abraham, Isaac, Ishamel, Jacob, Moses, Jesus and all the other prophets. The Qur’an is simply a ‘confirmation’ of the previous scriptures. Nobody must be forced to accept Islam, because each of the revealed traditions had its own din; it was not God’s will that all human beings should belong to the same faith community. God was not the exclusive property of any one tradition; the divine light could not be confined to a single lamp, belonged neither to the East or to the West, but enlightened all human beings. Muslims must speak courteously to the People of the Book, debate with them only in ‘the most kindly manner’, remember that they worshipped the same God, and not engage in pointless, aggressive disputes.
Karen Armstrong
The destruction of something beautiful can appear so entertaining.
Thomas Sweeney
Above all others I pity the homeless: where can they go to masturbate?
Robert Clark
Like many men who experience fatherhood relatively late in life, Martin Luther was a devoted parent. Luther wrote his children letters of touching intensity, patiently converting the joys of the Christian life into a language of storytelling fit for the very young. A home with children brought out the best in Luther in a way that theological disputation patently did not.
Andrew Pettegree
Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself.
Dee Brown
Do not ask your childrento strive for extraordinary lives.Such striving may seem admirable,but it is the way of foolishness.Help them instead to find the wonderand the marvel of an ordinary life.Show them the joy of tastingtomatoes, apples and pears.Show them how to crywhen pets and people die.Show them the infinite pleasurein the touch of a hand.And make the ordinary come alive for them.The extraordinary will take care of itself.
William Martin
Acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.
Thomas Carlyle
The popular image [in England] of Bonaparte as a blood-stained tyrant and bandit was admittedly exaggerated, but instinct told even the most radical among the English that if liberty, equality, and justice were ever to come to their shores, it certainly was not Napoleon who would bring them there.
J. Christopher Herold
If a child cannot place implicit confidence in his parent, most assuredly no confidence can be reposed in the child.
John S.C. Abbott
History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.
Stacy Schiff
At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.)
Anna Reid
I have not done enough for effect." Horace Greeley
Harold Holzer
Female friendships that work are relationships in which women help each other belong to themselves.
Louise Bernikow
It has been raining here for ten years.I keep an accurate record of time and can state this with no fear of contradiction.
Alastair Bruce
It was evangelicals' sense of rudderlessness - their desire for an authority to guide them in questions of dogma, life, and worship - that led them to rediscover liturgy and history in the first place. The irony was that in their smorgasbord approach to non-Protestant tradition, in their individualistic rejection of the rules of any one church in favor of a free run of the so-called church universal, in their repudiation of American nationalism in favor of cosmopolitanism, young evangelicals were being quintessentially evangelical and stereotypically American, doing as they pleased according to no authority but their own. The principle of sola scriptura was far clearer in theory than in practice. No matter evangelicals' faith that, with the 'illumination of the Holy Spirit,' 'Scripture could and should interpret itself,' too many illuminated believers came to different conclusions about what the Bible meant. Inerrantists who asserted their 'literal' interpretation with absolute certainty could do so only by covertly relying on modern, manmade assumptions. Other evangelicals were now searching for similar assurance in the authority of church history and the mystery of worship.
Molly Worthen