Quotes by Historians - Page 84

The creative personality is always one that looks on the world as fit for change and on himself as an instrument for change. Otherwise, what are you creating for? If the world is perfectly all right the way it is, you have no place in it. The creative personality thinks of the world as a canvas for change and of himself as a divine agent of change.
Jacob Bronowski
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.Shovel them under and let me work-- I am the grass; I cover all.And pile them high at GettysburgAnd pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.Shovel them under and let me work.Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.
Carl Sandburg
Unless the relationship of law to Christianity is re-established, there is no future except destruction for Western culture.
R. J. Rushdooney
We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, and burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors.
Henry Adams
the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: “Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library.” As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United States, it gives physical form to the principle that public access to knowledge is the foundation of democracy ["What Libraries Can (Still) Do," The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].
James Gleick
There is no method of reasoning more common, and yet none more blameable, than, in philosophical disputes, to endeavour the refutation of any hypothesis, by a pretence of its dangerous consequences to religion and morality. When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain that an opinion is false, because it is of danger-ous consequence. Such topics, therefore, ought entirely to be forborne; as serving nothing to the discovery of truth, but only to make the personof an antagonist odious.
David Hume
When he told me that he would fight forever, I knew that he would have to be defeated.
Philippa Gregory
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.
Karl Marx
The common man wants nothing of life but health, longevity, amusement, comfort -- "happiness." He who does not despise this should turn his eyes from world history, for it contains nothing of the sort. The best that history has created is great suffering.
Oswald Spengler
In the same year, the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique added fuel to the fire of a growing feminist discontent. The author spoke to middle-class White women, bored in suburbia (an escape hatch from increasingly Black cities) and seeking sanction to work at a “meaningful” job outside the home. Not only were the problems of the White suburban housewife (who may have had Black domestic help) irrelevant to Black women, they were also alien to them. Friedan’s observation that “I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children” seemed to come from another planet.
Paula J. Giddings
The only path of escape he could conceive as yet for Lady Harman lay through the chivalry of some other man. That a woman could possibly rebel against one man without the sympathy and moral maintenance of another was still outside the range of Mr. Brumley's understanding. It is still outside the range of most men's understandings -- and of a great many women's.
H.G.Wells
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.
Woodrow Wilson
Especially appealing to the planter elite was the conservatism of the American Revolution. Indeed, according to their reading, it had been so conservative that it hardly deserved the title of revolution at all. The goal had been simple political independence, and the issue of home rule had not expanded to include the dangerous question of who should rule at home. The men who made the revolution had maintained control in victory.
James L. Roark
And then they lived happily, and we who hear the story are happier still.
Andrew Lang
Lincoln began to emerge from his funk by helping a coworker who looked up to him out of a funk of his own.
Richard Brookhiser
So much of liberalism in its classical sense is taken for granted in the west today and even disrespected. We take freedom for granted, and because of this we don't understand how incredibly vulnerable it is.
Niall Ferguson
A rich and mature life involves opening up to a wider world. If we base our understanding of life only on what we personally experience, we are impoverished indeed.
Robert Strayer
The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle
Life is to be entered upon with courage.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I don't care what your daddy told you. I don't care what your grandaddy told you. The South lost. Get over it man! -January, 2003; Opening lecture to Intro to Civil War Era Studies, Gettysburg College
Mark A. Weitz
Knowledge can never imprison you, but you can be captive to your ignorance.
A.E. Samaan
I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being.
Woodrow Wilson
...if George Washington founded the nation, John Marshall defined it.
Jean Edward Smith
Natural science in England, as Darwin already knew to his cost, was still the purview of Christian scholars. But here was a question that Darwin found compelling: if God had created all the creatures of the world, what possible reason could there be for the variations found in the Galápagos?
Jonathan Clements
One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
Wallace Stegner
The highest and most lofty trees have the most reason to dread the thunder.
Charles Rollin
Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.
H.G.Wells
All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning -- not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.
Michel Foucault
It doesn't follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it's ancestral. It doesn't follow you can't cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It's as natural and desirable as -- syphilis...
H.G.Wells
Nobody needs saving, just a little bit of empathy
John O'Callaghan
Indeed, in the majority of cases the dying person has already lost consciousness. Death had been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped. All these little silent deaths have replaced and erased the great dramatic act of death, and no one any longer has the strength or patience to wait over a period of weeks for a moment which has lost a part of its meaning.
Philippe Ariès
What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit.
H.G.Wells
For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.
Emma Donoghue
It isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one's material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings.
H.G.Wells
Keep your standards even when everyone around you is losing theirs.
Habeeb Akande
The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression,more exact,compact, and ready than ordinary language. The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential facts of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.
H.G.Wells
What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?
Barbara W. Tuchman
Pope Pius XI called for a world-wide day of prayer, to be held on 16 March 1930, on behalf of the persecuted believers in Russia. This action led Stalin to suspend temporarily the antireligious campaign, according to Roy Medvedev
Lynne Viola
Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.
Diane Ravitch
There are those that want "freedom" from individual responsibility. Then there are those that want individual "liberty." I choose the latter. I am a Libertarian
A.E. Samaan
A "centrally planned economy" by definition discourages and despises participation by the masses. It's a bureaucratic oligarchy.
A.E. Samaan
The horizons of man are incomparably narrower than that of the land on which he toils. Editor of the Nebraska journal
H.W. Brands
They say so is half a lie.
Thomas Fuller
Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.
Rick Perlstein
Eight-and-twenty years,' said I, 'I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet.'The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open.'Ay,' she broke in; 'and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There's a many things to see, when one's still but eight-and-twenty.' She swayed her head slowly from side to side. 'A many things to see and sorrow for.' ("The Red Room")
H.G.Wells
If you run after two hares you will catch neither.
Thomas Fuller
A man is born; his first years go by in obscurity amid the pleasures or hardships of childhood. He grows up; then comes the beginning of manhood; finally society's gates open to welcome him; he comes into contact with his fellows. For the first time he is scrutinized and the seeds of the vices and virtues of his maturity are thought to be observed forming in him. This is, if I am not mistaken, a singular error.Step back in time; look closely at the child in the very arms of his mother; see the external world reflected for the first time in the yet unclear mirror of his understanding; study the first examples which strike his eyes; listen to the first word which arouse with him the slumbering power of thought; watch the first struggles which he has to undergo; only then will you comprehend the source of the prejudices, the habits, and the passions which are to rule his life.
Alexis de Tocqueville
That's what you got for being a servant of no ambition: a shrunken life, hung up like a gibbet as a warning to others.
Emma Donoghue
It is useful to remember that no matter where we turn, there is rarely any shortage of elevated ideals to accompany the resort to violence.
Noam Chomsky
What Christians see, or claim to see, in Genesis 1-3 changed as the church itself changed from a dissident Jewish sect to a popular movement persecuted by the Roman government, and changed further as this movement increasingly gained members throughout Roman society, until finally even the Roman emperor himself converted to the new faith and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire.
Elaine Pagels
Now, these eager and apprehensive men of small property constitute the class which is constantly increased by the equality of conditions. Hence, in democratic communities, the majority of the people do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one.
Alexis de Tocqueville
There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite the other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard.
H.G.Wells
Thought assists memory in enabling it to order the material it has assembled. So that in a systematically ordered memory every idea is individually followed by all conclusions it entails.
Jan Potocki
...everyone goes home in the end.
Emma Donoghue
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg
The cowardly dog barks more violently than it bites.
Quintus Curtius Rufus
There are none so superstitious as the educated, for often they see in their own time - as an article of faith unsubstantiated by experience - the final end of human progress.
Charles A. Coulombe
By the way, this tells you why Auto-Tuned vocals on many contemporary records sound so shallow and lifeless. It’s almost as if everything we learned from African American music during the twentieth century was thrown out the window by technologies in the twenty-first century. The goal should not be to sing every note dead center in the middle of the pitch---we escaped from that musical prison a hundred years ago. Why go back? In an odd sort of way, much of contemporary pop music resembles opera, with all the subtle shadings of bent notes and microtonal alterations abandoned in the quest for mathematically pure tones.
Ted Gioia
Rather than pound or a national mind that he believed had been closed by his critics, John Quincy Adams decided to seek a place in the is the esteem of future generations.
Paul C. Nagel