Quotes by Historians - Page 93

The two grappled in the quiet of old-fashioned personal diplomacy.
Paul C. Nagel
Mankind are tolerant of the praises of others as long as each hearer thinks that he can do as well or nearly as well himself, but, when the speaker rises above him, jealousy is aroused and he begins to be incredulous.
Thucydides
The right-wing Tories and the conservative Whigs fought Napoleon as the Usurper and the Enemy of the Established Order; the liberal Tories and the radical Whigs fought him as the Betrayer of the Revolution and the Enslaver of Europe; they were all agreed in fighting him, and his notion that their disagreement signified national disunion was mere wishful thinking. All dictators since his time have fallen into the same trap: themselves blind to the values of liberty, they cannot conceive that people who disagree on its meaning can nevertheless unite in upholding their freedoms against patent despotism.
J. Christopher Herold
Now you have to kiss me so my feelings aren't hurt.""I meant to hurt your feelings," Charlotte said."I guess that means I'll have to kiss you myself so I feel better.
Andrea Cremer
Lieutenant Welsh remembered walking around among the sleeping men, and thinking to himself that 'they had looked at and smelled death all around them all day but never even dreamed of applying the term to themselves. They hadn't come here to fear. They hadn't come to die. They had come to win.
Stephen E. Ambrose
...what an unfair advantage the dead had over the living, for there could be no rebuttal, no denial, nothing but the accusing silence of the grave.
Sharon Kay Penman
No! no! My engagement is with no bride--the worms! the worms expect me! I am a dead man--I have been slain by robbers--my body lies at Wurtzburg--at midnight I am to be buried--the grave is waiting for me--I must keep my appointment!
Washington Irving
One simple but powerful consequence of the fractal geometry of surfaces is that surfaces in contact do not touch everywhere. The bumpiness at all scales prevents that. Even in rock under enormous pressure, at some sufficiently small scale it becomes clear that gaps remain, allowing fluid to flow.
James Gleick
Given the obstacles to merging these fragile and diverse forms of storytelling into a single tale, it is, paradoxically, by venturing in the opposite direction -- by listening for the silences between accounts; by discovering what each genre of recordkeeping cannot tell us -- that we can capture most fully the human struggle to understand our elusive past. What this past asks of us in return is a willingness to recount all our stories -- our darkest tales as well as our most inspiring ones -- and to ponder those stories that violence has silenced forever. For until we recognize our shared capacity for inhumanity, how can we ever hope to tell stories of our mutual humanity?
Karl Jacoby
Expenditure rises to meet income.
C. Northcote Parkinson
To those who think them selves strong, force always seems the easiest solution.
Barbara W. Tuchman
Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.
Thomas Fuller
Fear is the parent of cruelty.
James A. Froude
It is common knowledge that 87% of the problems of the world are caused by cats. No cats, no problems."Hank the Cowdog
John Erickson
Bad ages to live through are good ages to learn from.
Eugen Weber
The limitation prompting folly " was an attitude of superiority so dense as to be impenetrable.
Barbara W. Tuchman
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.
Hilaire Belloc
Lincoln said his spiky hair had "a way of getting up in the world".
Harold Holzer
Don't let your will roar when your power only whispers.
Thomas Fuller
everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent
Michel Foucault
Gratitude leads to a good attitude
Habeeb Akande
A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the "value-forming substance", the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration, and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days etc.
Karl Marx
For such is the noble nature of man, that his heart will never wholly lose itself in one single passion or idol, or, as people call it apologetically, one idea. On it goes from one devotion to the next, not because it is ashamed of its first love, but because it must be on fire perpetually. To fall for Reason, as our grandfathers did, is but one Fall of Man among his many passionate attempts to find the apples of knowledge and eternal life, both in one. When a nation, or individual, declines the experiences that present themselves to passionate hearts only, they are automatically turned out from the realm of history. The heart of man either falls in love with somebody or something, or it falls ill. It can never go unoccupied. And the great question for mankind Is what is to be loved or hated next, whenever an old love or fear has lost its hold.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
Maximus was cleaning his blade on the dead man’s wolfskin. ‘You promised him his life,’ the Greek said. ‘No, I said death was his last worry.’ Maximus swung up on to Pale Horse. ‘Is that not so for all of us?
Harry Sidebottom
Our outsideness, after all, is a major part of what makes us different from the direct participants in history and enables us, as historians, to render the past intelligible and meaningful in ways that simply are not available to those immediately in- volved. In other words, outsideness, whether that of Americans addressing the Chi- nese past or of historians in general addressing the past in general, does not just distort; it also illuminates. This means that, as I said earlier, our central task is to find ways of exploiting our outsideness that maximize the illumination and mini- mize the distortion.
Paul A. Cohen
Leaning forward in the chair, Harley squeezed out a controlled fart, so no one could hear it. This damn reception area was like a echo chamber. If he weren’t careful, it could reverberate around the hall like a shotgun blast.
Alan Kinross
Most frequently asked question at my AI talks: Will robots be conscious? We slaughter 60 billion animals/year, but are concerned for robots?
Piero Scaruffi
No one means all he says and yet very few say all they mean.
Henry Adams
It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.
Tariq Ali
A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even if she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family.
Philippa Gregory
The poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions, without understanding the science which puts it to use; and his selfishness is no less blind than was formerly his devotedness to others. If society is tranquil, it is not because it is conscious of its strength and its well-being, but because it fears its weakness and its infirmities; a single effort may cost it its life. Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure. The desires, the repinings, the sorrows, and the joys of the present time lead to no visible or permanent result, like the passions of old men, which terminate in impotence.
Alexis de Tocqueville
It is the greatest and the tallest of trees that the gods bring low with bolts and thunder. For the gods love to thwart whatever is greater than the rest. They do not suffer pride in anyone but themselves.
Herodotus
Every noble crown is and on Earth will forever be a crown of thorns.
Thomas Carlyle
No one can bar the road to truth and to advance its cause I'm ready to accept even death.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The grief of children was unconditional, fueled by the implicit belief that it would last forever; for a child, grief was not grief unless it was eternal.
Andrew Taylor
By the Middle Ages… the introduction of the Trivium was well-known: SÂDI, an educated black from Tombouctou, author of the well-known work entitled, ‘Tarikh es-Soudan’ cites amongst the subjects that he mastered, logic, dialection, grammar, rhetoric, not to mention law and other disciplines...the long lists of subjects studied and the lettered African intellectuals who taught them at the University of Tombouctou…
Cheikh Anta Diop
Jack Kennedy protected a mature and presidential image – tough, yet not unduly combative.
David Pietrusza
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Thomas Carlyle
There are innumerable instances suggesting that modern intellectuals do not believe themselves that they don't really believe what they say that they say certain things only in order to assure themselves that they possess opinions and ideas that are different from those that are entertained by the common herd of men.
John Lukacs
A cowardly cur barks more fiercely than it bites.
Quintus Curtius Rufus
Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spentmore time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a governmentdiverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from bicepsto neurons.
Yuval Noah Harari
I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy...But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head...The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you.From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.
Howard Zinn
A temple, first of all, is a place ofprayer; and prayer is communion with God. It is the 'infinite in manseeking the infinite in God.' Where they find each other, there is holysanctuary--a temple.
B.H. Roberts
Hail Caesar those who are about to die salute thee.
Suetonius
Renown is a source of toil and sorrow obscurity is a source of happiness.
Johann L. von Mosheim
Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but nevertheless the very dregs of human civilisation and moral standards. A historian who finds excuses for such conduct by references to the supposed spirit of the times, or by omission, or by silence, shows thereby that his account of events is not to be trusted.
C.L.R. James
Historians of technology have asked why no industrial revolution developed in antiquity. The simple answer seems to be that there was no need, that contemporary modes of production and the slave-based economy of the day satisfactorily maintained the status quo. The capitalist idea of profit as a desirable end to pursue was completely foreign to the contemporary mentality. So, too, was the idea that technology on a large scale could or should be harnessed to those ends. An industrial revolution was literally unthinkable in antiquity.
James E. McClellan
There is more than a mere suspicion that the scientist who comes to ask metaphysical questions and turns away from metaphysical answers may be afraid of those answers.
Gregory Zilboorg
In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
Karl Marx
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
Karl Marx
To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
Thomas Carlyle
The principle of equality, which makes men independent of each other, gives them a habit and a taste for following, in their private actions, no other guide but their own will. This complete independence, which they constantly enjoy towards their equals and in the intercourse of private life, tends to make them look upon all authority with a jealous eye, and speedily suggests to them the notion and the love of political freedom. Men living at such times have a natural bias to free institutions. Take any one of them at a venture, and search if you can his most deep-seated instincts; and you will find that, of all governments, he will soonest conceive and most highly value that government whose head he has himself elected, and whose administration he may control.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The return we reap from generous actions is not always evident.
Francesco Guicciardini
Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children.In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.
Robert Higgs
He does not believe who does not live according to his belief.
Thomas Fuller
We can't make you do anything, but we can make you wish you had. - Army saying
Stephen E. Ambrose
The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.
W.E.B. Du Bois
..we have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance.
Will Durant
I do not read for I have renounced life, I read because one life is just not enough for me.
Abbas Al-Akkad
No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.
Noam Chomsky