Quotes by Historians

The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.

Rebecca Solnit

The theory of Communism may be summed up in one sentence: Abolish all private liberty.

A.E. Samaan

Most principles are limp until they are tested.

Richard Brookhiser

Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.

Michel de Certeau

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.

Barbara W. Tuchman

I'm an idealist: I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way.

Carl Sandburg

How much our society values its children can be measured by how well they are treated and protected.

Howard Markel

Washington once advised his adopted grandson that where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent. For there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.

Ron Chernow

You must bear losses like a soldier, the voice told me, bravely and without complaint, and just when the day seems lost, grab your shield for another stand, another thrust forward. That is the juncture that separates heroes from the merely strong.

Margaret George

What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet ... I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.

Wallace Stegner

Another explanation for the failure of logic and observation alone to advance medicine is that unlike, say, physics, which uses a form of logic - mathematics - as its natural language, biology does not lend itself to logic. Leo Szilard, a prominent physicist, made this point when he complained that after switching from physics to biology he never had a peaceful bath again. As a physicist he would soak in the warmth of a bathtub and contemplate a problem, turn it in his mind, reason his way through it. But once he became a biologist, he constantly had to climb out of the bathtub to look up a fact.

John M. Barry

Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart.

Washington Irving

Greatness in the last analysis is largely bravery-courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards.

James Harvey Robinson

The more corrupt the state the more laws.

Tacitus

Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States.

J. Bartlet Brebner

It is a great shame for anyone to listen to the accusation that Islam is a lie and that Muhammad was a fabricator and a deceiver. We saw that he remained steadfast upon his principles, with firm determination; kind and generous, compassionate, pious, virtuous, with real manhood, hardworking and sincere. Besides all these qualities, he was lenient with others, tolerant, kind, cheerful and praiseworthy and perhaps he would joke and tease his companions. He was just, truthful, smart, pure, magnanimous and present-minded; his face was radiant as if he had lights within him to illuminate the darkest of nights; he was a great man by nature who was not educated in a school nor nurtured by a teacher as he was not in need of any of this.

Thomas Carlyle

What we saw in Richard Nixon's face was the panic in his soul. – Richard Goodwin

David Pietrusza

The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it's a temporary and local place...

Rebecca Solnit

When the mechanic has to mend a watch he lets the wheels run out; but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions.

Friedrich Schiller

To claim the mantle of purity is always a risky business. It just gives an excuse to be disillusioned once your ordinary humidity is exposed.

Rick Perlstein

Defining by a general law the expenditures on the...school....is a very different thing from appointing the state as educator of the people. Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.

Karl Marx

Had the Battle of Franklin ever really ended? Carrie walked her cemetery, and around her the wounds closed up and scarred over, but only in that way that an oak struck by lightning heals itself by twisting and bending around the wound: it is still recognizably a tree, it still lives as a tree, it still puts out its leaves and acorns, but its center, hidden deep within the curtain of green, remains empty and splintered where it hasn't been grotesquely scarred over. We are happy the tree hasn't died, and from the proper angle we can look on it and suppose that it is the same tree as it ever was, but it is not and never will be.

Robert Hicks

In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you’ve taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself … is that it’s purpose? No it’s not. It’s to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices. And these same institutions run political campaigns. It’s pretty much the same: you have to undermine democracy by trying to get uninformed people to make irrational choices.

Noam Chomsky

Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Henry Adams

Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth we have spoken it

Alfred Whitney Griswold

It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The exotic and the erotic ideals go hand in hand, and this fact also contributes another proof of a more or less obvious truth - that is, that a love of the exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire.

Mario Praz

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

Great empires are not maintained by timidity.

Tacitus

Up to this point, it was rare for the mad to be distinguished from the poor, the homeless, the indigent, beggars, vagabonds, petty criminals and others who were unable to fit into society or take care of themselves. It was rare, too, that they were locked up.

Mike Jay

Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!

Thomas Carlyle

Gone are the days when girls used to cook like their mothers and boys used to dress like their fathers. Now girls drink like their fathers and boys dress like their mothers.

Habeeb Akande

Let me be one of the upward and outward lookers, not one of the downward and inward lookers.

Alfred Edersheim

Although Martin Luther's theological message was couched as an exhortation to all Christian people, his frame of reference, the human experiences on which he drew and his emotional sympathies, or almost entirely German.

Andrew Pettegree

For four centuries now, the American people have resigned themselves to natural disasters and acts of God: floods, prairie fires, blizzards, tornados, hurricanes, dust bowls, epidemics, academics, lawyers, and politicians.

Markham Shaw Pyle

In spite of this, there is no doubt that the modern European and American system of universal education suffered from serious defects. In the first place, the achievement of universality was purchased by the substitution of quantitative for qualitative standards. Education was accepted as a good in itself and the main question was how to increase the total output: how to teach more and more people more and more subjects for longer and longer periods. But in proportion as education became universal, it became cheapened. Instead of being regarded as the privilege of a few it became a compulsory routine for everybody.

Christopher Henry Dawson

One grey cloak is much like another, just as all cats are grey in the dark.

Andrew Taylor

Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Unlike any other empirical object in Nature, the mind's presence is immediately apparent to itself, but opaque to all external observers.

George Makari

The father of confederation is deadlock.

Goldwin Smith

Our muddy machine gun pits were transformed into Courage Clubs when bombs fell or Japanese warships pounded us from the sea. There was protocol to be observed, too, and it was natural that the poor fellow who might break into momentary terror should cause pained silence and embarrassed coughs. Everyone looked the other way, like millionaires confronted by the horrifying sight of a club member borrowing five dollars from the waiter.

Robert Leckie

Yet basically, libertarians are for freedom and liberty forindividuals, while recognizing that in order to be free we must also beprotected. Your freedom to swing your arms ends at my nose.

Michael Shermer

Everyone's got a different story.

Emma Donoghue

There is a certain relief in change even though it be from bad to worse as I have found in travelling in a stagecoach that it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.

Washington Irving

He had been present in their minds not as a man but as an idea.

Barbara W. Tuchman

When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other and according to the superiority which I discover, I pronounce my decision. Always I reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

David Hume

For Jefferson, William and Mary was largely about what university life is supposed to be about: reading books, enjoying the company of like-minded, and savoring teachers who seemed to be ambassadors from other, richer, writer worlds. Jefferson believed Williamsburg "the finest school of manners and morals that ever existed in America.

Jon Meacham

Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental poise — absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness — the faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone — a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure.

Henry Adams

America's mission is to join the most ancient civilizations with the most modern. John Augustus Roeblin

H.W. Brands

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself

Carl Sandburg

WHITE NATIONALISTS & BLACK LIVES MATTER: The harder you swing the pendulum one way, the more violently it will swing back.

A.E. Samaan

He printed business cards celebrating his shift. They read, 'Ars gratia pecuniae.' Translated, it meant, 'Art for money's sake.

Kliph Nesteroff

Yes, its hard to write. But its harder not to.

Carl Clinton Van Doren

Men die in battle women die in childbirth.

Philippa Gregory

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

You have dwelt overmuch upon pain. Pain is a swift distress; it ends and is forgotten. Without memory and fear pain is nothing, a contradiction to be heeded, a warning to be taken. Without pain what would life become? Pain is the master only of craven men. It is in man's power to rule it.

H.G.Wells

My days I devote to reading and experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy. There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.

H.G.Wells

Politics is pointless if it does nothing to enhance the beauty of our lives.

Howard Zinn

I would rather contend with an honest asshole than a duplicitous diplomat.

A.E. Samaan

It's all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it's immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don't rule it out.

Niall Ferguson

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