Quotes by Historians - Page 74

Canadians have been accustomed to define themselves by saying what they are not.
William Kilbourn
But this does not take away the fact that Luke sees the frustrations women face, including the constant discipline of being quietly useful while others crowd in to take the more obviously attractive roles. Furthermore, he remembers Jesus as a teacher who was willing to recognize the value of women's contribution. Working in partnership with a man also protected the women from being bothered by other men who resented their independent activity or simply wanted to meddle. For the women of Galilee, Jesus was invaluable as a sympathetic male focal point around which their activity could be organized. The presence of such a person in their midst would have been a godsend even if the man in question had not been a miracle-worker.
Kate Cooper
She noticed, as an exceptional woman would, that her stepson was exceptional.
Richard Brookhiser
Our side has agents. Their side has spies.
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
In insisting that peasant activity contrary to Communist policies could be defined as kulak while at the same time maintaining that his approach to the peasantry was based on scientific Marxist class analysis, Lenin provided his successors with conceptualizations that would be used in collectivization when Stalin launched a war against all peasants.
Lynne Viola
Healing is the initial justification for every upgrade.
Yuval Noah Harari
Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious cooperation, true history, would at last begin. For if this was not so, do the ideas of progress, of history, have any meaning? Is there not a movement, however tortuous, from ignorance to knowledge, from mythical thought and childish fantasies to perception of reality face to face, to knowledge of true goals, true values as well as truths of fact? Can history be a mere purposeless succession of events, caused by a mixture of material factors and the play of random selection, a tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing? This was unthinkable. The day would dawn when men and women would take their lives in their own hands and not be self-seeking beings or the playthings of blind forces that they did not understand. It was, at the very least, not impossible to conceive that such an earthly paradise could be; and if conceivable we could, at any rate, try to march towards it. That has been at the centre of ethical thought from the Greeks to the Christian visionaries of the Middle Ages, from the Renaissance to progressive thought in the last century; and indeed, is believed by many to this day.
Isaiah Berlin
Teddy Roosevelt "had relished "every hour" of every day as president. Indeed, (he was) fearing the "dull thud" he would experience upon returning to private life.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
The argument that there are just wars often rests on the social system of the nation engaging in war. It is supposed that if a ‘liberal’ state is at war with a ‘totalitarian’ state, then the war is justified. The beneficent nature of a government was assumed to give rightness to the wars it wages.t...Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were liberals, which gave credence to their words exalting the two world wars, just as the liberalism of Truman made going into Korea more acceptable and the idealism of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society gave an early glow of righteousness to the war in Vietnam.tWhat the experience of Athens suggests is that a nation may be relatively liberal at home and yet totally ruthless abroad. Indeed, it may more easily enlist its population in cruelty to others by pointing to the advantages at home. An entire nation is made into mercenaries, being paid with a bit of democracy at home for participating in the destruction of life abroad.
Howard Zinn
... a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.
Rebecca Solnit
It's rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible "Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family". It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence come from and what we can do about it a lot more productively. Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time.
Rebecca Solnit
Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings
Barbara W. Tuchman
The power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance.
Yael Zerubavel
Elegance is timeless
Habeeb Akande
But marrying within one's own family can get monotonous. One has heard all the same family stories, knows all the jokes and all the same recipes. No novelty.
Margaret George
Welcome to Irkalla, the Land of the Dead,” the woman said. “I am Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld.
Alan Kinross
Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions.
Yuval Noah Harari
The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity was not the result of some obscurely accepted law of retaliation. It was the effect, in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power: of a power that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations; of a power that asserted itself as an armed power whose functions of maintaining order were not entirely unconnected with the functions of war; of a power that presented rules and obligations as personal bonds, a breach of which constituted an offence and called for vengeance; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility, the first sign of rebellion, which is not in principle different from civil war; of a power that had to demonstrate not why it enforced its laws, but who were its enemies, and what unleashing of force threatened them; of a power which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations; of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as 'super-power'.
Michel Foucault
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
Will Durant
Nothing we ever imagined is beyond our powers, only beyond our present self-knowledge.
Theodore Roszak
It is almost startling to hear this warning of departed time sounding among the tombs, and telling the lapse of the hour, which, like a billow, has rolled us onward towards the grave.
Washington Irving
To those Romans December twenty-fifth was the birthday of the sun. They wrote that in gold letters in their calendar. Every year about that time, the middle of winter, the sun was born once more and it was going to put an end to the darkness and misery of winter. So they had a great feast, with presents and dolls for everybody, and the best day of all was December twenty-fifth. That feast, they would tell you, was thousands of years old- before Christ was ever heard of.
John G. Jackson
A piece of advice his father had given him surfaced in Edgar's mind. Sometimes, he had said, it's better just to keep quiet and think with your heart.
Sharan Newman
when exactly do the abuses that have been tolerated for so long become intolerable? When does the fear evaporate and the rage generate action that produces joy?
Rebecca Solnit
Objectivity, in this sense, means that a person's statements about the world can be trusted if they are submitted to established rules deemed legitimate by a professional community. Facts here are not aspects of the world, but consensually validated statements about it.
Michael Schudson
Confrontation was the stuff of daily life.
T.J. Stiles
He that is overcautious will accomplish little.
Friedrich von Schiller
The self is also a creation, the principal work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist.
Rebecca Solnit
People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went aboutpretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which every­thing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment.
Michel Foucault
We try to transform each detainee from a young man who wants to die to a young man who wants to live. Prince Mohammed bin Nayef
Robert Lacey
[James M. Buchanan] directed hostility toward college students, public employees, recipients of any kind of government assistance, and liberal intellectuals. His intellectual lineage went back to such bitter establishment opponents of Populism as the social Darwinists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The battle between "the oppressed and their oppressors," as one People's Party publication had termed it in 1892, was redefined in his milieu: "the working masses who produce" became businessmen, and "the favored parasites who prey and fatten on the toil of others" became those who gained anything from government without paying proportional income taxes. "The mighty struggle" became one to hamstring the people who refused to stop making claims on government.
Nancy MacLean
Not all weapons are guns or blades; the most dangerous are subtle, hidden.
Andrea Cremer
Having money will make you look enticing to women even if you are not a good-looking dude. Don’t believe me, go ask Mick Jagger, Donald Trump, Jay-Z and the rest of the fugly men who have all the money and get all the fine women.
Rebecca Scott
In Chapter 5 we consider swindles and defalcations. It happens that crashes and panics often are precipitated by the revelation of some misfeasance, malfeasance, or malversation (the corruption of officials) engendered during the mania. It seems clear from the historical record that swindles are a response to the greedy appetite for wealth stimulated by the boom. And as the monetary system gets stretched, institutions lose liquidity, and unsuccessful swindles are about to be revealed, the temptation to take the money and run becomes virtually irresistible. It is difficult to write on this subject without permitting the typewriter to drip with irony. An attempt will be made.
Charles P. Kindleberger
Like racism, misogyny can never be adequately addressed by its victims alone.
Rebecca Solnit
If it were not for hopes, the heart would break.
Thomas Fuller
An effort was made to spread this new materialist atheism with its Communist consequence "by the sword" (as the metaphor goes), that is, by the invasion of neighboring countries with consequent further massacres and the extension of the area of despotic Soviet control... This armed attempt at expansion was checked by Catholic Poland, the most immediately exposed victim, in what has been called "one of the decisive battles of the world.
Hilaire Belloc
The 'free' laborer, thanks to the development of capitalistic production, agrees, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his birthright for a mass of pottage.
Karl Marx
Only a few prefer liberty- the majority seek nothing more than fair masters.
Sallust
We arc the miracle of miracles the great inscrutable mystery of God.
Thomas Carlyle
When De Long arrived in California with Emma that May, he went straight down to the yard and feasted his eyes upon his new ship. He was smitten by the transformation that had taken place during his absence. "I am perfectly satisfied with her," he wrote. "She is everything I want.
Hampton Sides
Good men do the most harm.
Henry Adams
My father says there are more than twenty thousand turned out for the king. It seems that most men think that we will win, that York will be captured and killed, though the king in his tender heart has said he will forgive them all if they will surrender.~Will there be another battle?~Unless York decides he cannot face the king in person. It is one sort of sin to kill your friends and cousins, quite another to order your bowmen to fire at the king's banner and him beneath it. What if the king is killed in battle? What if York brings his broadsword down on the king's sanctified head?
Philippa Gregory
[A]fter all it was true that a girl does not go alone in the world unchallenged, nor ever has gone freely alone in the world, that evil walks abroad and dangers, and petty insults more irritating than dangers, lurk.
H.G.Wells
By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.
Laurent Dubois
But capital not only lives upon labour. Like a master, at once distinguished and barbarous, it drags with it into its grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers, who perish in the crises.
Karl Marx
Put out more energy and it will return to you ... multiplied.
Jon Tetsuro Sumida
For it is good to cleave to God, and to put our hopes in the Lord, so that, when we have exchanged this poor life for the kingdom of heaven, we may cry aloud: 'Whom have I in heaven but thee? There is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.' Assuredly, when we have found such wealth in heaven, we may well grieve to have sought after poor passing pleasures here on earth.
Jerome
My eyes refuse to let him leave, but he stands still holding my hand, lingering for as long as possible.
Thomas Sweeney
The life I chose when I promised my six-year-old self never to forget being a child, never to grow frightened and dishonest like the grownups I saw, nodding politely to each other without affection, and decided to put my true self in a time capsule for later use.
Aurora Levins Morales
Rapid expansion coupled with social stability is proof of Umar's incredible capabilities as a leader
Firas Alkhateeb
We are nature's unique experiment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our destiny
Jacob Bronowski
For thousands of years priests, rabbis and muftis explained that humans cannot overcome famine, plague and war by their own efforts. Then along came the bankers, investors and industrialists, and within 200 years managed to do exactly that.
Yuval Noah Harari
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air.
Carl Sandburg
The person who has never made an enemy will never make a friend.
Peter Tremayne
As sure as God is good so surely there is no such thing as necessary evil.
Robert Southey
Perhaps hell is like that; a discordant confusion of anxious souls. Some argued, some slept, some shouted, some wept, some wrote, some sketched and many conspired about their coming interrogation. But mostly they did no more than stare into space, eyes unfocused as they tried to see tomorrow.
Len Deighton
Pretty quickly, I stopped seeing the company as an engine of community. Instead, I saw it as a mythmaker offering only an illusion of belonging and meeting its customers' desire for connections in form, maybe, but surely not in substance. Once I came to this conclusion, I started to dig deeper into the company's other promises--great working conditions, musical discovery, fair treatment of farmer, and concern for the environment. Every time I went excavating, the stories turned out to be more complex, more heavily edited, and more ambiguous than I had first thought. Each time, it became clear that Starbucks fulfilled its many promises only in the thinnest, most transitory of ways and that people's desires went largely unfulfilled.
Bryant Simon
If you will only consider, you will remember many a person of whom the world never heard and will never hear, whose years have been as full of generosity, loyalty to duty, faith in God, fidelity to every day's work, as those of Franklin or Garfield, Lincoln or Emerson. They, also, have put their hands to the plough and have not looked back. Having made up their minds to what ought to be done, they did not hesitate, did not procrastinate, did not worry or grow anxious, but faithfully performed the duty of the hour. They had faith in Providence, and so did with their might what their hands found to do. They gave, and it was given to them again, "full measure, pressed down and running over." They did good, hoping for nothing again, and the reward came in lives full of content; in cheerfulness, peace, and satisfaction.
James Clarke
The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or to wretchedness.
Alexis de Tocqueville