Quotes by Historians - Page 10

Treatment for people with disabilities and mental illness in prewar America reveals a profoundly ignorant medical establishment and educational community.

Kate Clifford Larson

Unlike Christianity which preached a peace that it never achieved Islam unashamedly came with a sword.

Stephen Runciman

[P]art of the pleasure of engaging with a writer is unraveling some allusions and admitting defeat by others.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state's power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.

Jacob Burckhardt

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract—a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists have finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence.

James Gleick

American Progressives have declared war on the sanctity and autonomy of the individual.

A.E. Samaan

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Will Durant

The heroic and often tragic stories of American whalemen were renowned. They sailed the world’s oceans and brought back tales filled with bravery, perseverance, endurance, and survival. They mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, sang, spun yarns, scrimshawed, and recorded their musings and observations in journals and letters. They survived boredom, backbreaking work, tempestuous seas, floggings, pirates, putrid food, and unimaginable cold. Enemies preyed on them in times of war, and competitors envied them in times of peace. Many whalemen died from violent encounters with whales and from terrible miscalculations about the unforgiving nature of nature itself. And through it all, whalemen, those “iron men in wooden boats” created a legacy of dramatic, poignant, and at times horrific stories that can still stir our emotions and animate the most primal part of our imaginations. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” proclaimed Herman Melville, and the epic story of whaling is one of the mightiest themes in American history.

Eric Jay Dolin

I have lived recklessly, gambled my income away at the horse races, gone whoring, have been more drunk than sober, beaten men to a pulp with my hands, have had a man’s nose cut off for insulting my father and have been indebted to villains more times than I care to say. But, I do not want to live like this anymore. I want a quiet life with a good woman who will care and love me – not for being the Duke of Monmouth, but for me, Jemmy.

Andrea Zuvich

Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB (ad men) found nothing to lament and the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to KNOW about a product, which in this case happens to be a human being, in half a minute – the speed not of thought but of emotion.

Rick Perlstein

[C]ontemporary Jesus research is still involved in textual looting, in attacks on the mound of Jesus tradition that do not begin from any overall stratigraphy, do not explain why this or that item was chosen for emphasis over some other one, and give the distinct impression that the researcher knew the result before beginning the search.

John Dominic Crossan

Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.

Will Durant

All that philosophers have done is interpret the world in different ways. It is our job to change it.

Karl Marx

I was never less alone than when by myself.

Edward Gibbon

Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends never lose a chance to make them.

Francesco Guicciardini

His saying was: live and let live.

Friedrich von Schiller

If you cannot do great things in life, make sure you do the small things in a great way.

Habeeb Akande

In the realm of the unknown, difficulties must be viewed as a hidden treasure! Usually, the more difficult, the better. It's not as valuable if your difficulties stem from your own inner struggle. But when difficulties arise out of increasing objective resistance, that's marvelous!

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Learn to love your haters, they are a wonderful source of inspiration.

Habeeb Akande

When Americans find out I grew up in the tenements, the question they invariably ask me is “how did you end up there?” Americans, it seems, find comfort in reasons and explanations. They honestly believe that if they can find the reason for someone else’s misfortune, they can avoid that misfortune themselves. If they could find out how I ended up in the tenements, they could assure themselves that it could never have happened to them.

Susan Lynn Peterson

Of course in the present situation the Communists have to use various disguises. Sometimes we hear words like "popular front," at other times "dialogue with Christianity." For Communists a dialogue with Christianity! In the Soviet Union this dialogue was a simple matter: they used machine guns and revolvers.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Look, Mrs. McGillicuddy, it's not my fault your son jumped out a dorm room window on Christmas eve. I've written over fifty books as a Columbia professor, all right? You don't do that by holding hands with every at-risk undergraduate who says he's homesick, or he's turning gay, or the dog ate his term paper. I write about Lincoln, and freedom, and great ideas. I don't always have time for students. It's like Dean Martin used to say: if you want to talk, go to a priest. Hey -- what's the gun for?

Eric Foner

We need to expose the motives of our political leaders, point out their connections to corporate power, show how huge profits are being made out of death and suffering.

Howard Zinn

Ne dites pas trop de mal de vous-meme: on vous croirait. - Don't talk too badly of yourself: they ight believe you.

André Maurois

There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.

Wallace Stegner

Men never feel quite the same about a woman's body once they know it's done that thing: widened and torn to push out a baby's head.

Emma Donoghue

The deceiver loses when there is correct response from the deceived...

Bipan Chandra

And yet not a dream, but a mighty reality- a glimpse of the higher life, the broader possibilities of humanity, which is granted to the man who, amid the rush and roar of living, pauses four short years to learn what living means

W.E.B. Du Bois

No writer should minimize the factor that affects everyone but is beyond control: luck.

John Jakes

When we've got a common philosophy and a common objective; then we can advance in open order. We shall be a great team. But we've got to make sure of that common set of ideas. Maybe we shall find our formulae difficult for some of these new types. If we keep our minds open, we may find that they are right and that our formulae have to be modified. Probably -- it's a thought that shouldn't dishearten us -- but probably we don't know everything.

H.G.Wells

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

Thomas Carlyle

In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Women are perfectly well aware that the more they seem to obey the more they rule.

Jules Michelet

What we need is a rebirth of satire of dissent of irreverence of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.

Arthur Schlesinger

If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.

Yuval Noah Harari

Better halfe a loafe than no bread.

William Camden

The end of the persecutions was, paradoxically, a source of disappointment for many Christians. In the new climate of imperial favour, bishops were increasingly at war with their congregations and with one another, arguing about matters ranging from the mundane to the mystical. Money was often at the root of the problem, and this was distressing.

Kate Cooper

The reader who is only superficially familiar with Caribbean affairs may find the materials of this volume strange. The extent to which violence, both open and covert, is a constant factor in the life of the region may cause surprise. The incongruous and rather unreal quality of many events, whether fanciful or farcical in appearance, may also prove unexpected. If the reader is inclined to doubt the authenticity of certain events, viewing them as too implausible to be true, he may be assured that many things even more strange, which are possibly and even probably true, have been omitted because their accuracy could not be satisfactorily established. Nothing is included here that does not come from sources considered sound. Nothing is included that has not been subjected to every possible verification.

Robert D. Crassweller

Your advice seems a little ironical.""Oh, you may either follow it or reverse it—that is its chief beauty. It is equally good taken either way.

Thomas Henry Lister

As there would be no more inheritance, there would be no more greed. Peter Kropotkin

Barbara W. Tuchman

As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted larger world.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

For the first time on Planet Earth (in 1964 America), a nation was made up of more college students than farmers. An unheard-of 42% of high school graduates sought higher education.

Rick Perlstein

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

Jacques Barzun

Pretty quickly, I stopped seeing the company as an engine of community. Instead, I saw it as a mythmaker offering only an illusion of belonging and meeting its customers' desire for connections in form, maybe, but surely not in substance. Once I came to this conclusion, I started to dig deeper into the company's other promises--great working conditions, musical discovery, fair treatment of farmer, and concern for the environment. Every time I went excavating, the stories turned out to be more complex, more heavily edited, and more ambiguous than I had first thought. Each time, it became clear that Starbucks fulfilled its many promises only in the thinnest, most transitory of ways and that people's desires went largely unfulfilled.

Bryant Simon

For Madison, on the other hand, “a Public Debt is a Public curse,” and “in a Representative Government greater than in any other.”26

Joseph J. Ellis

Ambition is the intellectual equivalent of body odour.

Jerry Toner

On any given morning, I might not be able to list for you the facts I know about God. But I can tell you what I wish to commit myself to, what I want for the foundation of my life, how I want to see. When I stand with the faithful at Holy Comforter and declare that we believe in one God . . . I am saying, Let this be my scaffolding. Let this be the place I work, struggle, play, rest. I commit myself to this.

Lauren F. Winner

And truth is malleable, something to be bent or stretched or made to disappear, but direct lies always find the path back to the one who tells them.

Karen Abbott

Provision for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life.

Woodrow Wilson

Medieval Technology? The Middle Ages invented among other things the crank the horse collar eyeglasses the flying buttress the stirrup the windmill the wheelbarrow printing firearms paper the canal lock the compass the rudder the mechanical clock the spinning wheel and the treadle.

Joseph and Frances Gies

How easy is it for one benevolent being to diffuse pleasure around him, and how truly is a kind heart a fountain of gladness, making everything in its vicinity to freshen into smiles.

Washington Irving

You can't see beauty with miserable eyes.

H.G.Wells

He who imitates what is evil always goes beyond the example that is set on the contrary he who imitates what is good always falls short.

Francesco Guicciardini

A shell in the pit," said I, "if the worst comes to worst will kill them all."The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet anxious face peering at me from under the pink lampshade, the white cloth with it silver and glass table furniture—for in those days even philosophical writers had luxuries—the crimson-purple wine in my glass, are photographically distinct. At the end of it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.So some respectable dodo in the Mauritius might have lorded it in his nest, and discussed the arrival of that shipful of pitiless sailors in want of animal food. "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear.

H.G.Wells

Harmony makes small things grow. Lack of it makes big things decay.

Sallust

I can see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.

Isaiah Berlin

My father says there are more than twenty thousand turned out for the king. It seems that most men think that we will win, that York will be captured and killed, though the king in his tender heart has said he will forgive them all if they will surrender.~Will there be another battle?~Unless York decides he cannot face the king in person. It is one sort of sin to kill your friends and cousins, quite another to order your bowmen to fire at the king's banner and him beneath it. What if the king is killed in battle? What if York brings his broadsword down on the king's sanctified head?

Philippa Gregory

We know how to win wars. We must learn now to win peace...

Stephen E. Ambrose

...but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.

Will Durant

Life is the only art that we are required to practise without preparation and without being allowed the preliminary trials the failures and botches that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.

Lewis Mumford

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