Quotes by Historians - Page 73

Truth is a continuous examination, and Fact... always supersedes belief.
Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan
If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.
Rebecca Solnit
...I suppose it is a lingering trace of Plutarch and my ineradicable boyish imagination that at bottom our State should be wise, sane, and dignified, that makes me think a country which leaves its medical and literary criticism, or indeed any such vitally important criticism, entirely to private enterprise and open to the advances of any purchaser much be in a frankly hopeless condition.
H.G.Wells
On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I want to say that further you are not a great chief of this country. That you have no following, no power, no control." Logan continued, "You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all you have and are today is because of the government. If it were not for the government you would be freezing and starving today in the mountains. I merely say these things to notify you that you cannot insult the people of the United States of America or its committees ...the government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men.-Senator John Logan, 1883
Dee Brown
It is more important to me that my students come out of my class believing 'This story is interesting and I might want to know more about it', than to fill them up with information. If I can remind them or convince them that history is interesting then I feel I have succeeded, because unlike chemistry or physics, history is a subject that anyone can teach themselves, if they are interested."[
H.W. Brands
The harder life is for a man when he is young, the easier it will be in the future.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The first 10 days of a cattle drive were the most critical, as a stampede was most likely when the cattle were closest to their habitual home.
H.W. Brands
Plain speaking is necessary in any discussion of religion, for if the freethinker attacks the religious dogmas with hesitation, the orthodox believer assumes that it is with regret that the freethinker would remove the crutch that supports the orthodox. And all religious beliefs are 'crutches' hindering the free locomotive efforts of an advancing humanity. There are no problems related to human progress and happiness in this age which any theology can solve, and which the teachings of freethought cannot do better and without the aid of encumbrances.
David Marshall Brooks
For a majority of women it remains difficult to reconcile increasingly burdensome maternal responsibilities with personal fulfillment.
Élisabeth Badinter
The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.
Thomas Carlyle
The fact that a reactionary can sometimes be right is a little less recognized that the fact that a liberal can be. . . .
Joseph Gies
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
Michel Foucault
Politicians make good company for a while just as children do - their self-enjoyment is contagious. But they soon exhaust their favourite subjects -themselves.
Garry Wills
The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.
Timothy Snyder
Men of much depth of mind can bear a great deal of counsel for it does not easily deface their own character nor render their purposes indistinct.
Arthur Helps
Depression can seem absurdly self aggrandizing to those who do not experience it, But that does not make it any less painful to those who do.
Richard Brookhiser
We are the choice elected fewLet all the rest be damnedThere is room enough in hell for youWe won’t have heaven crammed!
Roland H. Bainton
But, mad or sane, Matthews was a man of no ordinary persistence. He was not prepared to renounce the peace plan, any more than he would be prepared to renounce his madness a few years later. A month later he was back in France, this time for an extended stay.The optimistic dawn of his revolutionary adventures was coming to an end, and his dark night of the soul was about to begin.
Mike Jay
He penned a letter to the Company in London, a letter whose unfailing spirit would become legendary among the sailors of the East India Company. 'I cannot tell where you should looke for me.' he wrote, 'because I live at the devotion of the winds and seas.' (Written by/about Captain James Lancaster, on the ship Red Dragon, during a terrible storm, 1603)
Giles Milton
Christine did not live, or love, as most people do. She lived boundlessly, as generous as she could be cruel, prepared to give her life at any moment for a worthy cause, but rarely sparing a thought for the many casualties that fell in her wake.
Clare Mulley
The great hall was shimmering in light, sun streaming from the open windows, and ablaze with colour, the walls decorated with embroidered hangings in rich shades of gold and crimson. New rushes had been strewn about, fragrant with lavender, sweet woodruff, and balm... the air was... perfumed with honeysuckle and violet, their seductive scents luring in from the gardens butterflies as blue as the summer sky.
Sharon Kay Penman
The three creative prototypes, the scientist, the artist, and the saint, know instinctively, without the help of any mere philosopher, that each must obey an absolute rule of conduct. Three words established and hallowed by usage express the divinities, the values, the supreme aims served respectively by these three kinds of men with an undivided loyalty: truth for the scientist; beauty for the artist; goodness for the saint. The discussion on what these words mean will never end. We must be content with taking note of their clarity as symbols, and of the singular force which animates them and makes of them powerful poles of attraction.
Salvador de Madariaga
Republics are brought to their ends by luxury monarchies by poverty.
Charles Montesquieu
Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Jacques Barzun
Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends
Alexis de Tocqueville
A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity...and therefore I think that it's, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.
Noam Chomsky
Baron Humboldt asked Jefferson, "Why are these libels allowed? Why is not this libelous journal suppressed, or its editor at least, fined and imprisoned? The question gave Jefferson a perfect opening. "Put that paper in your pocket, Baron, and should you hear the reality of our liberty, the freedom of our press, questioned, show this paper, and tell where you found it.
Jon Meacham
Which is worse? Lust for the purchasing power of money, or the kind of lust that covets power over others? Let the history of 20th Century socialist revolutions answer that question.
A.E. Samaan
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G.Wells
We succeed in enterprises which demand the positive qualities we possess but we excel in those which can also make use of our defects.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Ambition is the intellectual equivalent of body odour.
Jerry Toner
Roman Catholicism is a broken and utterly desperate thing, capable only of malignant mischief in our awakening world.
H.G.Wells
Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed—even preferred, if only for public relation purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by beasts in men's shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order.
Noam Chomsky
A nation is a body of people who have done great things together.
Ernest Renan
A central administration enervates the nations in which it exists by incessantly diminishing their public spirit. If such an administration succeeds in convincing all the disposable resources of a people, it impairs at least the renewal of those resources.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility.
Andrew J. Bacevich
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Isaiah Berlin
How much of assumed national and personal character comes from the fact that we have never truly known need to the point of having our character tested? Willing conscientious objectors underwent controlled starvation and confirmed how quickly it impacts the initiative and generosity we like to think of as "American" characteristics.
Nathaniel Philbrick
A story just isn't a story without a dragon.
H.B. Bolton
In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.
Rebecca Solnit
In what appears to have been an unplanned quip, Wilberforce asked Huxley if he thought he was descended from an ape on his father's or mother's side. Huxley retorted that he would rather have simian relatives than claim kinship with a man who used his charisma and authority to quash free debate.
Jonathan Clements
The principal error that befalls those who want to depict men is to suppose that they have a fixed character rather than a life that is but a tissue of contradictions: the more deeply one studies them, the less one dares to delineate them.
Charles Pinot Duclos
the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
Rebecca Solnit
Government was rarely more than a choice between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
Barbara W. Tuchman
The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man.
Niall Ferguson
One soft humid early spring morning driving a winding road across Mount Tamalpais, the 2,500-foot mountain just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bend reveals a sudden vision of San Francisco in shades of blue, a city in a dream, and I was filled with a tremendous yearning to live in that place of blue hills and blue buildings, though I do live there, I had just left there after breakfast.
Rebecca Solnit
It's been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don't learn, or can't remember it, are doomed to repeat it.
Steve Berry
Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure if they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.
Carl Sandburg
The executive possesses means of distracting Parliament from its proper function; it seduces members by the offer of places and pensions, by retaining them to follow ministers and ministers' rivals, by persuading them to support measures —whereby the activities of administration grow beyond Parliament's control. These means of subversion are known are known collectively as corruption, and if ever Parliament or those who elect them—for corruption may occur at this point too—should be wholly corrupt, then there will be an end of independence and liberty.
J.G.A. Pocock
[Blinker] Hall, operating on the quaint theory that the Navy might be needed for battle and that whatever increased the ship's efficiency was a criterion for change, had continued trampling on the toes of orthodoxy.
Barbara Tuchman
Parents accept their obsolescence with the best grace they can muster. . . they do all they can to make it easy for the younger generation to surpass the older while secretly dreading the rejection that follows.
Christopher Lasch
I would know you anywhere for my true love. Whoever I was and whoever you were, I would know you at once for my true love.
Philippa Gregory
The immortality of Thomas Jefferson does not lie in any one of his achievements, or in the series of his achievements, but in his attitude towards mankind and the conception which he sought to realize in action of the service owed by America to the rest of the world...Thomas Jefferson was a great leader of men because he understood and interpreted the spirits of men.
Woodrow Wilson
...As marriage was woman's business, unmarried women, though doubtless unfortunate, must simply be considered as business failures: harsh, doubtless, but in tune with the sink-or-swim capitalist times.
Ruth Brandon
There are those that want freedom from individual responsibility, and then there are those that want individual liberty. "Freedom" and "liberty" no longer mean what they used to. A desire for dependence has been made fashionably desirable.
A.E. Samaan
My son is my son till he have got him a wife But my daughter's my daughter all the days of her life.
Thomas Fuller
Too fair to worship too divine to love.
Henry Hart Milman
Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you they're supposed to help you discover who you are.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
Philosophy goes no further than probabilities and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
James Froude