Quotes by Historians - Page 82

Western civilisation, the élitists all understood, is built upon discrimination: a culture that does not rest on discrimination, that penalises people who discriminate, or rewards the undiscriminating, is worth very little and has only callow, childish pleasures.
Richard Davenport-Hines
Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.
David Hume
Lilith opened the shutters and allowed herself to bathe in the bright moonlight, as it shone across the Highland Glen.
Alan Kinross
Initial uniformity can be deceiving, warns the author, because parties arrive at that state from so many different motives which will be exposed over time.
Donald R. Hickey
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.Workingmen of all countries unite!
Karl Marx
[P]art of the pleasure of engaging with a writer is unraveling some allusions and admitting defeat by others.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto
The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.
H.G.Wells
I have always thought that in revolutions, especially democratic revolutions, madmen, not those so called by courtesy, but genuine madmen, have played a very considerable political part. One thing is certain, and that is that a condition of semi-madness is not unbecoming at such times, and often even leads to success.
Alexis de Tocqueville
They have a very low rate for attempted murder and a high rate for successfully concluded murder. It seems that when a French person sets out to kill someone, they make a good job of it.
Nick Yapp
Advice to young Samuel Gompers that might apply in many other areas: "Learn from socialism, but don't join it.
Barbara W. Tuchman
What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly reducing the productivity and profitability of slave labor. Living within this African American culture, sustained by strong community ties, many slaves were able to maintain a certain sense of apartness, of pride, and of independent identity.
David Brion Davis
I used to think if I could be free I should be the happiest woman," a young Mississippi woman recalled. "But when my master come to me, and says 'Lizzie, you is free!' it seems like I was in a kind of daze. And when I would wake up in the morning I would think to myself, Is I free? Hasn't I got to get up before daylight and go into the field and work?
Leon F. Litwack
In America, the materio-economic conditions relate to a societal, multi-group existence in a way never before know in world history. American Negro nationalism can never create its own values, find its revolutionary significance, define its political and economic goals, until Negro intellectuals take up the cudgels against the cultural imperialism practiced in all of its manifold ramifications on the Negro within American culture. But this kind of revolution would have to be predicated on the recognition that the cultural and artistic originality of the American nation is founded, historically, on the ingredients of a black aesthetic and artistic base.
Harold Cruse
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment
Theodore H. White
To be honest one must be inconsistent.
H.G.Wells
House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.
Barbara W. Tuchman
The author perceives nuances of Abigail Adams' character in the occasional errors she makes in readily quoting John Milton. Rather than giving the observer a reason to quibble, they are evidence that she had absorbed Milton's works enough to feel comfortable quoting them from memory.
David McCullough
The history of mankind," said Dreed, "has been a history of betrayals, the perennial betrayal of the common man by the men he has trusted.""By the men the lazy, haphazard, childish oaf was too wilfully stupid to mistrust," said Bodisham. "The history of mankind from the very beginning has been a history of over-trusted trustees, corrupted by their unchecked opportunities.
H.G.Wells
This is a paradise of rising to the occasion that points out by contrast how the rest of the time most of us fall down from the heights of possibility, down into diminished selves and dismal societies. Many now do not even hope for a better society, but they recognize it when they encounter it, and that discovery shines out even through the namelessness of their experience. Others recognize it, grasp it, and make something of it, and long-term social and political transformations, both good and bad, arise from the wreckage. The door to this ear's potential paradises is in hell.
Rebecca Solnit
The percentage of leading scientists who profess not to believe in a personal God tells us little unless we also know on what they base their profession. How much do they know about metaphysics, Christian theology, and intellectual history in relationship to their particular areas of scientific expertise? The intellectual relationship between religion and science is a two-way street. Just as one ought not to place much stock in geological views of a religious believer who has never studied geology, so one ought not to give much credence to the religious views of a scientist who has never studied intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, and theology. The highly specialized character of contemporary academic life makes it perfectly possible to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics, for example, while knowing nothing about the theology of creation, metaphysical univocity, and why they matter for questions pertaining to the reality of God and the character of God's relationship to the natural world.
Brad S. Gregory
In an exhibition wherein paintings of nudes were commonplace, that of Madame Gautreau in her black evening dress was considered scandalously erotic. -from The Greater Journey
David McCullough
Elizabeth's whole style of rule was pragmatic and free from preconceptions. It was not that she had no strategic aims, but they were broad and simple. God had entrusted her with three things: a realm to defend; a church to lead in the true way; and a people to protect, both against foreign enemies and against themselves.
David Loades
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
Barbara W. Tuchman
What we see in a democracy governed by “representatives” is not a government “for the people” but an organized conflict of interests that only results in the setting up of unstable balances of power.
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
The joke loses everything when the joker laughs himself.
Friedrich Schiller
I am unaware of his plans but I shall never stop believing in them because I cannot fathom them and I prefer to mistrust my own intellectual capacities than his justice.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Education must not simply teach work - it much teach life
W.E.B. Du Bois
We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value
Karen Armstrong
Constantinople had been changing for sometime before the Young Turks got hold of it. It would continue to change long after they had gone.
Charles Emmerson
Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?
Howard Zinn
No age lives entirely alone; every civilization is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it.
Ronald Balfour British Monuments Man
According to his habit, Theodore Roosevelt sought to harness anxiety through action.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
The ritual denunciation of the so-called ‘socialist’ states is replete with distortions and often outright lies.
Noam Chomsky
One does not hold a conversation with him. One holds a symposium. – Elizabeth Drew
Rick Perlstein
Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren't his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he's lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself.
Karl Marx
Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.
Wallace Stegner
Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny.
Hilaire Belloc
If it's really education you want for Nathan,' Buell said, 'have him read the papers, so he'll know what's going on in the world, and why. Teach him to be interested in everything he doesn't understand - interested enough to find out about it from books or people that aren't afraid to tell the truth.
Kenneth Roberts
But human beings are not machines, and however powerful the pressure to conform, they sometimes are so moved by what they see as injustice that they dare to declare their independence. In that historical possibility lies hope.
Howard Zinn
A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Adams
Enlarged sympathy with children was one of the chief contributions made by the Victorian English to real civilization.
George Macaulay Trevelyan
Many fear mistakes. In TV and films you just re-shoot the scene. In life do the same and just shoot a re-take.
Ian Dobson
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.
Thomas Carlyle
When I was young, women were raped on the campus of a great university and the authorities responded by telling all the women students not to go out alone after dark or not to be out at all. Get in the house. (For women, confinement is always waiting to envelope you.) Some pranksters put up a poster announcing another remedy, that all men be excluded from campus after dark. It was an equally logical solution, but men were shocked at being asked to disappear, to lose their freedom to move and participate, all because of the violence of one men.
Rebecca Solnit
When speculators have once entered Wall Street, they never leave it except in a pine box or a rosewood case, according to circumstances.
H.W. Brands
Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it has been argued, America its independence.
Stacy Schiff
His [Pitt's] successor as prime minister was Mr. Addington, who was a friend of Mr. Pitt, just as Mr. Pitt was a friend of Mr. Addington; but their respective friends were each other's enemies. Mr. Fox, who was Mr. Pitt's enemy (although many of his friends were Mr. Pitt's friends), had always stood uncompromisingly for peace with France and held dangerously liberal opinions; nevertheless, in 1804, Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt got together to overthrow Mr. Pitt's friend Mr. Addington, who was pushing the war effort with insufficient vigor.
J. Christopher Herold
The less that women are visible as a research subject, the less we are likely to learn about lesbians.
Bonnie J Morris
Yet despite...accommodations with commerce, Möser regarded the market as primarily a threat--to the artisanal citizens of the town, to the traditional wants of the peasantry, and to the political structure to society, since it created a growing class of people outside the traditional paternalistic relations of the countryside. Möser's conception of contemporary political and economic trends in Osnabrück was essentialy tragic and tinged with that idealization of the past that would later be called romantic. Möser's heroes were the artisan-citizen and the independent peasant, his villains the shopkeeper and the peddler.
Jerry Z. Muller
Be the business never so painful you may have it done for money.
Thomas Fuller
Just as Napoleon was the sole authority in the state, so the husband and father was to exercise authority over his family. Unfortunately the only possible result of despotism on either level is hypocrisy.
J. Christopher Herold
There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.
Carl Sandburg
Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see further.
Thomas Carlyle
No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States but I never saw the Government of the United States.
Woodrow Wilson
We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor.
David Brion Davis
A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.
Carl Sandburg
What the myth founds is a double existence between the upper world and the underworld: a dimension of death is introduced into life, and a dimension of life is introduced into death.
Walter Burkert
It is so delightful to teach those one loves!
Andrew Lang
A wife's loyalty is tested when her husband has nothing. A husband's loyalty is tested when he has everything.
Habeeb Akande
We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing
Thucydides