Quotes by Historians - Page 91

The great truth for Innokenty used to be that we are given only one life.Now, with the new feeling that had ripened in him, he became aware of another law: that we are given only one conscience, too.A life laid down cannot be reclaimed, nor can a ruined conscience.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
What these thinkers, chroniclers, and interpreters have written about, how they have theorized their scholarly endeavors, and their approaches and methodologies have inevitably been informed and shaped by the times in which they existed.
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie
the German and Japanese governments heavily subsidized their chemical industries for war purposes. Government subsidies, direct or indirect, spurred German developments in synthetic rubber and plastics, synthetic fuels, light metals, and various other substitutes for natural materials.However, the world's chemical industries would have grown rapidly without artificial encouragement.
George W. Stocking
Racism is a refuge for the ignorant. It seeks to divide and to destroy. It is the enemy of freedom, and deserves to be met head-on and stamped out.
Pierre Berton
In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.
Alexis de Tocqueville
People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way -even when those stories concern their own native counties...Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are more inclined to accept the first story they hear.
Thucydides
In the closed circle of the war cabinet, pounded by terrible report after terrible report, there had been uncertainty about whether he could fend off the drift to exploring a deal with Hitler. The determination of the larger group trumped the tentativeness of the smaller, and Churchill fulfilled his role as leader by disentangling himself from defeatism--one of his singular achievements at the end of May 1940.
Jon Meacham
I passionately love liberty, legality, respect for rights, but not democracy. That is what I find in the depth of my soul.
Alexis de Tocqueville
He screamed in agony as large black wings erupted from his back - each had four large talons on it.
Alan Kinross
We know how to win wars. We must learn now to win peace...
Stephen E. Ambrose
When meeting criticism, he would regard it not as something to resent but as a thing to be examined, like an interesting beetle. "That's a curious view, not uninteresting.
Barbara W. Tuchman
Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.
Michel de Certeau
When private bands of fanatics commit atrocities we call them "terrorists," which they are, and have no trouble dismissing their reasons. But when governments do the same, and on a much larger scale, the word "terrorism" is not used, and we consider it a sign of our democracy that the acts become subject to debate. If the word "terrorism" has a useful meaning (and I believe it does, because it marks off an act as intolerable, since it involves the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose), then it applies exactly to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Howard Zinn
John F. Kennedy responded, as he often did when at his best, skillfully mixing dollops of wit with, self-deprecation, and the principle of not-really-going-near-the-question.
David Pietrusza
It is only when I dally with what I am about look back and aside instead of keeping my eyes straight forward that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart. But the first broadside puts all to rights.
Sir Walter Scott
Better give a shilling than lend and lose half a crown.
Thomas Fuller
His body walks out onto the darkened stage , and a roar goes up from the crowd. He stands in front of the mic, and he can feel his face twist in a sneer-the Elvis sneer from his dreams-though he never told it to move. He is powerless now, a spectator at his own moment of glory.
Joseph Garraty
So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.
Will Durant
By buying the power of the workman, the capitalist has, therefore, acquired the right to use of make that labouring power during the whole day or week.
Karl Marx
Unless one's philosophy is all-inclusive nothing can be understood.
Mary Ritter Beard
Do not forget to tell your daughters God made them beautiful.
Habeeb Akande
History is indeed stranger than fiction. The twists and turns of human history are too outlandish for to be believable in any work of fiction.
A.E. Samaan
Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.
Noam Chomsky
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
Thomas Babington Macaulay
We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.
Woodrow Wilson
We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.
Richard Marius
Everyone's got a different story.
Emma Donoghue
He (the immigrant father) would walk by proxy in the Elysian fields of liberal learning.
H.W. Brands
They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.
W.E.B. Du Bois
If it’s not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people things to me they know and I’m interested in but don’t yet know. It’s when they explain things to me I know and they don’t that the conversation goes awry.
Rebecca Solnit
There was so much – so many tests and tasks, so many tiny referenda.
H.W. Brands
In no issue of foreign policy could her prevarication and indecisiveness be said to have led to disastrous consequences for her country. On the international stage there was no better survivor. At home her achievement can only be judged with hindsight. A combination of good sense and longevity settled the church, and it was no fault of hers that confessional issues became so divisive forty years after her death. She gave her country pride, and set its commercial development on a course that was eventually to be spectacularly successful; for that she deserves more credit than she is usually given.
David Loades
A Guardian investigation concluded that between 10,000 and 20,000 people died as an 'indirect' result of the US bombing, that is, through hunger, cold and disease as people were forced to flee the massive aerial assault. An estimate by Professor Marc Herold of the University of New Hampshire, suggests that between 3,125 and 3,620 Afghan civilians were killed by US bombing up to July 2002.3
Mark Curtis
The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.
Noam Chomsky
For some people, she thought, trials were only temporary; they sailed towards happiness through the roughest weather.
Emma Donoghue
I am a machine condemned to devour books.
Karl Marx
Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peace?
Noam Chomsky
Socialists seem to think George Orwell’s 1984 is a suggestion, or at least are unashamed of mimicking the methods of the totalitarian state Orwell depicted. Libertarians know it to be a warning, and a government that micro-manages all aspects of humanity an intolerable reality.
A.E. Samaan
Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball.
Jacques Barzun
Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.
James Carroll
A proverb is one man's wit and all men's wisdom.
John Russell
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.
Timothy Snyder
The American people are strange in their attitudes toward their idols," he (Taft) mused. They lead them on and then "cut their legs from under them," simply "to make their fall all the greater.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Autumn that year painted the countryside in vivid shades of scarlet, saffron and russet, and the days were clear and crisp under harvest skies.
Sharon Kay Penman
All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.
Thomas Carlyle
And that's the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their week ones.
Jill Lepore
I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past.
J. Rufus Fears
A nation is a body of people who have done great things together in the past and hope to do great things together in the future.
Frank Underhill
They watched the rain and downed their Cokes like a pair of diabetics in a suicide pact.
Paco Ignacio Taibo II
The Bedlam that greeted James Tilly Matthews, then, was not so much a baroque spectacle of depravity as an exhausted and run-down public institution, its building falling apart and its professional image tarnished.
Mike Jay
God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.
Richard Brookhiser
Measurements "are never enough. The artist's eye and desire to breathe life into the subject must be the deciding factors.
David McCullough
Patton would have said a warmer goodbye to his horse, The author writes on Eisenhower's cold dismissal of his wartime lover.
Jean Edward Smith
My father told me by the time you die you'll be lucky if you have six people you called your friends to carry your coffin.I now realize and believe the truth is I thought if I had a dollar for every friend I in my life I'd be rich. The sad truth is if I had a penny for every true friend I have I wouldn't have a nickel.
Peter Fryer
To be a philosophical Sceptic is the first and most essential step towards being a sound, believing Christian.
David Hume
In a way, underdevelopment is a paradox. Many parts of the world that are naturally rich are actually poor and parts that are not so well off in wealth of soil and sun-soil are enjoying the highest standards of living. When the capitalists from the developed parts of the world try to explain this paradox, they often make it sound as though there is something “God-given” about the situation. One bourgeois economist, in a book on development, accepted that the comparative statistics of the world today show a gap that is much larger than it was before. By his own admission, the gap between the developed and underdeveloped countries has increased by at least 15 to 20 times over the last 150 years. However, the bourgeois economist in question does not give a historical explanation, nor does he consider that there is a relationship of exploitation which allowed capitalist parasites to grow fat and impoverished the dependencies. Instead he puts forward a biblical explanation! Pg. 21
Walter Rodney
If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles.
Howard Zinn
Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.
Norman Davies
Boys torment each other when there’s nothing else to do and no Frenchmen to fight.
Christian Cameron
The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
Thomas Fuller