Quotes by Historians - Page 68

In a society of increasingly mass-produced, assembly-line entertainment, where every individual is treated like an empty pitcher to be filled from above, jazz retains something of the spirit of the handicrafts of yesteryear. The print of the human spirit warms it. Deep down, jazz expresses the enforced & compassionate attitudes of a minority group and may well appeal to us because we all have blue moods and, in a fundamental sense, none of us is wholly free.
Marshall W. Stearns
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The more of himself man attributes to God the less he has left in himself.
Karl Marx
Physicians of the Utmost Fame were called at once but when they came they answered as they took their fees 'There is no cure for this disease.'
Hilaire Belloc
History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.
Karl Marx
The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a free falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli.
Thomas E. Woods Jr.
There is no indication that any church official suggested or supported the emperor's action against gay people. On the contrary, the only persons known by name to have been punished for homosexual acts were prominent bishops.
John Boswell
Today we are less likely to speak of humanitarianism, with its overtones of paternalistic generosity, and more likely to speak of human rights. The basic freedoms in life are not seen as gifts to be doled out by benevolent well-wishers, but as Casement said at his trial, as those rights to which all human beings are entitled from birth. It is this spirit which underlies organizations like Amnesty International, with its belief that putting someone in prison solely for his or her opinion is a crime, whether it happens in China or Turkey or Argentina and Medecins Sans Frontieres, with its belief that a sick child is entitled to medical care, whether in Rwanda or Honduras or the South Bronx.
Adam Hochschild
They ask me what is madness and I reply it is a gift.They ask me why, and I said:The world trough the eyes of normal people is boring, but look at it trough the eyes of the mad, then you will know why I enjoy my madness so much!
Seid Šabanović
Arnold Harberger, Milton Friedman & Co. Inc., your modest proposal of partial equilibrium for the general good is not without its own internal contradictions. Moreover, you cannot take complete credit for this program of equilibriation. Although you and your colleagues and disciples at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago may have dedicated two decades to the design of the program and the technical training of its executors, it took the approach of another major economic and political crisis of capitalism, analogous to that of the 1930's, to mobilize the political support and the military force to instal a government prepared to put your program of equilibration and your equilibrating experts to work in Chile - and you, Milton Friedman, are still waiting to put your part of the same program, complete with Brazilian style indexing, into practice at home for the glory and benefit of the bourgeoisie in the USA, whom you so faithfully serve as paid executors and executioners.
André Gunder Frank
I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveler: £10,000 for the first man to over Marco Polo’s outward route, reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he a drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might or might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon.
Robert Byron
The effectiveness of work increases according to geometrical progression if there are no interruptions.
André Maurois
We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death.
Russell Shorto
Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face t
Jared Diamond
The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!
Wallace Stegner
But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. The one thing trains for the other.
H.G.Wells
No one, even as a joke, could call a member of the all-Union Communist Party a Neo-Hegelian, a Neo-Kantian, a Subjectivist, an Agnostic, or, God forbid, a Revisionist. But "epicurean" sounded so harmless it could not possibly imply that one was not an orthodox Marxist.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The race of mankind would perish did they cease to aid each other. We cannot exist without mutual help. All therefore that need aid have a right to ask it from their fellow man and no one who has the power of granting can refuse it without guilt.
Sir Walter Scott
We tell our stories, especially as young people, in part because we want them to be true. We want life to be full of adventure and creativity and daring that might, just might, be real.
Dana Frank
Excitement about things became a habit, a part of my personality, and the expectation that I should enjoy new experiences often engendered the enjoyment itself.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.
Rebecca Solnit
A celebrity is a person known for his well-knownness. Celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by being well known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis celebrities live off each other.
Daniel J. Boorstin
It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.
Noam Chomsky
Computer hackers are the true journalists in the 21st Century. The old journalism is worse than dead. It is unreliable to the point that it is nothing more than a nuisance, an obstacle in the pursuit of truth.
A.E. Samaan
Where there is power, there is resistance.
Michel Foucault
Every memory we have changes slightly each time we think about it. We add stuff we learn in other places, or we forget stuff that doesn't seem important anymore. Or you think you remember something, like from your childhood, but actually you've just seen so many pictures of it, and your parents have told you about it, so you think you remember it, but you don't. A memory is a process. Instead of a thing. Like a story we tell ourselves that changes from the standpoint we're looking at it.
Katherine Howe
People forget that there's two sides to every story. Of course somebody is going to tell the side of it that makes them look good and exaggerate the rest to make everyone else look bad.
David Reeves
He is the kind of person I should expect to rescue one from a mad dog at any risk but then insist on a stoical indifference to the fright afterward." Jefferson Davis's future wife describing him at first meeting.
Shelby Foote
Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power?
Doris Kearns Goodwin
If God were mortal and had but one life to give, he would have been more careful about how he created the world.
A.E. Samaan
An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.
C.L.R. James
I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...
Rebecca Solnit
The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.
Henry Adams
This marriage had resulted from impulse: he had seen her on a high-flying swing at Tsarkoe Selo and her skirt, flared by the breeze, had exposed her ankles; he had proposed the following day.
Robert K. Massie
Sometimes I cannot say much about why I go to church other than what people who go to the gym say: I always feel better once I'm there; I feel better after; it is always good for me, not good in a take-your-vitamins way, in a chidingly moralistic way, but in a palpable way.
Lauren F. Winner
Life isn't just a gift, it's an abundant series of more gifts (i.e. Feather Presents) than one can count
Jean Williams
Some Southerners effectively applied slave labor to the cultivation of corn, grain, and hemp (for making rope and twine), to mining and lumbering, to building canals and railroads, and even to the manufacture of textiles, iron, and other industrial products. Nevertheless, no other American region contained so many white farmers who merely subsisted on their own produce. The “typical” white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops.
David Brion Davis
I don’t like boys.”I shook my head. “That’s no impediment to them. Madame raised gentlemen of both sexes.
Ada Palmer
There was a greater truth — that of a glorious struggle, hard-fought and hard-won, in which many fell martyrs and countless others made sacrifices, dreaming of the day India would be free. That day had come. The people of India saw that too, and on 15 August — despite the sorrow in their hearts for the division of their land danced in the streets with abandon and joy.
Bipan Chandra
There's no shame in honest suffering, my dear.
Andrea Cremer
Now listen to me. I will not walk on one-way streets any longer. Your wound is my wound, (though you don't know that mine is yours), and I do what I can, but the well will run dry. You will use us up. There are women whose first stretching across borders was into your lives. When they discover how you make use of their compassion, they will turn away heartsick, stricken, withering in the freshness of their hope. There are women who were leaders, who worked night and day, defeated not by foreign policy, but by the sexual politics of solidarity, bitter now, unable to work anywhere near you. How dare you speak of the New Woman! We are your richest resource besides your endurance, and you use us like rags to wrap around your pain.
Aurora Levins Morales
The only thing that keeps a man going is energy. And what is energy but liking life?
Louis Auchincloss
Ben Franklin advises his grandson not to let even the American Revolution interrupt his studies, urging of young adulthood, "This is the time of life in which you are to lay the foundations of your future improvement and of your importance among men. If this season is neglected, it will be like cutting off the spring from the year.
H.W. Brands
Because the American people have traditionally taken a warlike, but not military, attitude to battle, and because they have always coupled a certain belligerence - no American likes being pushed around - with a complete unwillingness to prepare for combat, the Korean War was difficult, perhaps the most difficult in their history.
T.R. Fehrenbach
And now I want love. Lust is no good for me. I want love. His love.
Philippa Gregory
If you cannot do great things in life, make sure you do the small things in a great way.
Habeeb Akande
Life among clones would not be worth living, and a sane person will only rejoice that others have abilities that they do not share. That should be elementary.
Noam Chomsky
Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature-the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself.
Dee Brown
In the 10th century, Baghdad instituted a licensing exam that all doctors had to take before practicing as physicians
Firas Alkhateeb
The Persians are very fond of wine ... It is also their general practice to deliberate upon affairs of weight when they are drunk and then in the morning when they are sober the decision to which they came the night before is put before them by the master of the house in which it was made and if it is then approved they act on it if not they set it aside. Sometimes however they are sober at their first deliberations but in this case they always reconsider the matter under the influence of wine.
Herodotus
A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.
Daniel J. Boorstin
I like stories about supervillains. They teach children that you can accomplish great things even when the whole world is against you.
G.D. Falksen
Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
James Gleick
Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.
Gerald Brenan
Unlike the huge majority of the current generation in the West, the men on both sides at Dien Bien Phu did not live at a time or in places where they enjoyed the luxury of disregarding [that war is what human beings do]; and we, who are lifelong civilians, have not earned the right to sit in judgement over them.
Martin Windrow
Sudden acquaintance brings repentance.
Thomas Fuller
The paradox of innovation is that it is accepted as an innovation when it has become imitation.
Piero Scaruffi
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
Thomas Carlyle
Basic trigonometric properties put forth by Muslim mathematicians serve as basis for how GPS systems work today
Firas Alkhateeb
That name was a sadistic play on the Underground Railroad that smuggled American slaves north. The old Nazis set up their own version and used it mainly to move their people. They called it Die Spinne.
John Pearce