Quotes by Historians - Page 77

In ticking off the things that weren’t done, it was easy to forget the big thing that was done. Against overwhelming odds, with the most meager resources, and often at fearful self-sacrifice, a few determined men reversed the course of the war in the Pacific. Japan would never again take the offensive. Yet the margin was thin—so narrow that almost any man there could say with pride that he personally helped turn the tide at Midway. It was indeed, as General Marshall said in Washington, “the closest squeak and the greatest victory.
Walter Lord
Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20—25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.
Jared Diamond
Sex is flagrantly separated from reproduction in a few species, including bonobos and dolphins.
Jared Diamond
Stay home and the crooks win. They get the night, by default and concession, the night which should rightly belong to all of us.
Claire Cross
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
Jared Diamond
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.
Noam Chomsky
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg
The living together for three long rainy days in the country has done more to dispel love than all the perfidies in love that have ever been committed.
Arthur Helps
Monuments! what are they? the very pyramids have forgotten their builders or to whom they were dedicated. Deeds not stones are the true monuments of the great.
John Lothrop Motley
The circumstances of everyday life were too demanding-and in American's great cities, appalling.
Charles E. Rosenberg
Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.
Richard Davenport-Hines
He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper but he is more excellent who suits his temper to any circumstances.
David Hume
In another place was a vast array of idols—Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.
H.G.Wells
Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished.
Rebecca Solnit
The scholar only knows how dear these silent, yet eloquent, companions of pure thoughts and innocent hours become in the season of adversity. When all that is worldly turns to dross around us, these only retain their steady value.
Washington Irving
In the tenth century BC, the priests of India devised the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic theological discourse. The object was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, the ultimate and inexpressible reality beyond human understanding. The idea was to push language as far as it would go, until participants became aware of the ineffable. The challenger, drawing on his immense erudition, began the process by asking an enigmatic question and his opponents had to reply in a way that was apt but equally inscrutable. The winner was the contestant who reduced the others to silence. In that moment of silence, the Brahman was present - not in the ingenious verbal declarations but in the stunning realisation of the impotence of speech. Nearly all religious traditions have devised their own versions of this exercise. It was not a frustrating experience; the finale can, perhaps, be compared to the moment at the end of the symphony, when there is a full and pregnant beat of silence in the concert hall before the applause begins. The aim of good theology is to help the audience to live for a while in that silence.
Karen Armstrong
We write history with our feet and with our presece and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep.
Rebecca Solnit
We should have realized it sooner, at least my father should have, that there was no coming back. Not in September when the riots died down, not in October when the subcontinent still lay in shock, not even in November as he had hoped and promised us. Lahore was now lost forever
Aanchal Malhotra
Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down the fence.
Carl Sandburg
Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one.
Will Durant
The Admiral so regrets failure, he cannot THINK of success.
John Taliaferro
Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.
Robert Zaretsky
Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal while others on the contrary obtain a victory by exerting at the last moment more vigorous efforts than before.
Polybius
We Germans will never produce another Goethe but we may produce another Caesar.
Oswald Spengler
Hagnon fixes a value to everything. It occurs to Alexander that the man would probably sell his mother for an obol and consider it a deal.
Eleanor Herman
Stalin was always exceptional, even from childhood. We have relied on Trotsky’s unrecognizably prejudiced portrait for too long. The truth was different. Trotsky’s view tells us more about his own vanity, snobbery and lack of political skills than about the early Stalin.
Simon Sebag Montefiore
No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.
Barbara W. Tuchman
He was one of those men whose constitutional inability to make small talk forfeits all one's sympathy and makes one think that social grace is sometimes a moral duty.
James Morris
To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.
Rebecca Solnit
Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.
Perry Anderson
Books pull you to other worlds ... let them, and enjoy the adventure.
H.B. Bolton
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
Thomas Carlyle
I would suggest that a feminism which does not also seek to alter the exploitation of poorer women is not feminism at all, but is simply a varient for of upper-class politics & self-privileging.
Jack D. Forbes
When you're dead, everything in the world is like a song that makes you cry.
Adam Selzer
Better halfe a loafe than no bread.
William Camden
Like the pioneering Muslim scientists, Al Bukhari insisted on an empirical, organized method in the science of fiqh and hadith
Firas Alkhateeb
watch out for schools that promise your kids will "experience success." I'm teaching Plato's Dialogues these days, and I noticed that Socrates never let his students experience success. Socrates won the argument every time.
David Kahn
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness but of power. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love.
Washington Irving
Unprovided with original learning unformed in the habits of thinking unskilled in the arts of composition I resolved to write a book.
Edward Gibbon
Life is two things. Life is morality – life is adventure. Squire and master. Adventure rules, and morality looks up the trains in the Bradshaw. Morality tells you what is right, and adventure moves you. If morality means anything it means keeping bounds, respecting implications, respecting implicit bounds. If individuality means anything it means breaking bounds – adventure.
H.G.Wells
I cannot do everything but still I can do something and because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do something I can do.
Edward Everett Hale
Enormity of the stakes became the new self-hypnosis.
Barbara W. Tuchman
There are instances, indeed, wherein men shew a vanity in resembling a great man in his countenance, shape, air, or other minute circumstances, that contribute not in any degree to his reputation; but it must be confess’d, that this extends not very far, nor is of any considerable moment in these affections. For this I assign the following reason. We can never have a vanity of resembling in trifles any person, unless he be possess’d of very shining qualities, which give us a respect and veneration for him. These qualities, then, are, properly speaking, the causes of our vanity, by means of their relation to ourselves. Now after what manner are they related to ourselves? They are parts of the person we value, and consequently connected with these trifles; which are also suppos’d to be parts of him. These trifles are connected with the resembling qualities in us; and these qualities in us, being parts, are connected with the whole; and by that means form a chain of several links betwixt ourselves and the shining qualities of the person we resemble. But besides that this multitude of relations must weaken the connexion; ’tis evident the mind, in passing from the shining qualities to the trivial ones, must by that contrast the better perceive the minuteness of the latter, and be in some measure asham’d of the comparison and resemblance.
David Hume
I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own day.
Philippa Gregory
I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map…nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, when in Benjamin’s terms, I have lost myself though I know where I am. Moments when I say to myself as feet or car clear a crest or round a bend, I have never seen this place before. Times when some architectural detail on vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home.
Rebecca Solnit
If silences could be pregnant, then this one went to full term.
Alison Weir
[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept the deaths of a fraction of their number in order to annihilate or crush their infidel enemy.
Jared Diamond
The earlier, the more fun. Why put it off? It’s the atomic age!
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience; how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature - the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy grades, the water, the soil, the air itself.
Dee Brown
Every minister worthy of the name has to walk the line between prophetic vision and spiritual sustenance, between telling people the comforting things they want to hear and challenging them with the difficult things they need to hear. In Oxford, Daddy began to feel as though all the members wanted him to do was to marry them and bury them and stay away from their souls.
Timothy B. Tyson
A man who has cured himself of all ridiculous prepossessions, and is fully, sincerely, and steadily convinced, from experience as well as philosophy, that the difference of fortune makes less difference in happiness than is vulgarly imagined; such a one does not measure out degrees of esteem according to the rent-rolls of his acquaintance. He may, indeed, externally pay a superior deference to the great lord above the vassal; because riches are the most convenient, being the most fixed and determinate, source of distinction. But his internal sentiments are more regulated by the personal characters of men, than by the accidental and capricious favours of fortune.
David Hume
To look up and not down To look forward and not back To look out and not in and To lend a hand.
Edward Everett Hale
I admit at the beginning that 'popular religion,' 'demotic religion,' the pieties of the common folk, tends to sink to the lowest common denominator, be it in syncretizing saints with old, half-forgotten pagan godlings, or in preferring the nasal whine and the revivalist shoutin' to solid sense and learning, regarding intellect as positively inimical to the workings of the Holy Ghost. But it is in American religious life, especially Protestant American religious life, that things bottom out completely.
Markham Shaw Pyle
If we can find out why the idea rather than the nation of Canada can win a growing loyalty rather than commanding it then it seems to me we shall have come very near to trapping the elusive creature the Canadian Identity.
George Woodcock
The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, perhaps the real questions facing us is not 'What do we want to become?', but "What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.
Yuval Noah Harari
As with almost every long oration, there were loose ends.
Richard Brookhiser
In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
Michel Foucault
Increase Mather, President of Harvard University, in his treatise on Remarkable Providences, insists that the smell of herbs alarms the Devil and that medicine expels him. Such beliefs have probably even now not wholly disappeared from among us.
James Henry Breasted
The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: “Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform.” That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.
Michel Foucault