Quotes by Historians - Page 11

Teain had no difficulty generating the indignation of a satirist. He lack the patience of a reformer.

H.W. Brands

A lot of the world seems to repeat itself

Emma Donoghue

But if America falters in greatness and purpose, than Americans are nothing but the offscourings and hungry of other lands.

Theodore H. White

Mistakes are often the best teachers.

James A. Froude

Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one.

Will Durant

No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty.

Jon Meacham

At the end of this journey, it seems to me that reconciling the long shadows cast by the uneasy past may ultimately depend on elements so basic that they bring to mind a simple Slav proverb I once came across and never forgot: Eat bread and salt and speak the truth. They are the recovery of fact, public accountability and the instituting of fair trials of one sort or another, to help mark ends and beginnings and to return the moral compass as close to the centre as possible.

Erna Paris

I cannot do everything but still I can do something and because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do something that I can do.

Edward Everett Hale

Jefferson attributes to a college professor and mentor his lifelong habit of questioning conventional wisdom.

John Ferling

Every infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade. When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to dig a hole in the ground beside him.

Viktor Suvorov

Only a small crack ... but cracks make caves collapse.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Today whenever women gather together it is not necessarily nurturing. It is coalition building. And if you feel the strain you may be doing some good work.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

I am better than my reputation.

Friedrich von Schiller

JULIAN HUXLEY’S “EUGENICS MANIFESTO”:“Eugenics Manifesto” was the name given to an article supporting eugenics. The document, which appeared in Nature, September 16, 1939, was a joint statement issued by America’s and Britain’s most prominent biologists, and was widely referred to as the “Eugenics Manifesto.” The manifesto was a response to a request from Science Service, of Washington, D.C. for a reply to the question “How could the world’s population be improved most effectively genetically?” Two of the main signatories and authors were Hermann J. Muller and Julian Huxley. Julian Huxley, as this book documents, was the founding director of UNESCO from the famous Huxley family. Muller was an American geneticist, educator and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation. Put into the context of the timeline, this document was published 15 years after “Mein Kampf” and a year after the highly publicized violence of Kristallnacht. In other words, there is no way either Muller or Huxley were unaware at the moment of publication of the historical implications of eugenic agendas.

A.E. Samaan

Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

Jared Diamond

If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are defined in such realistic and defensible terms as to admit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force.

Richard Hofstadter

Pride in office without competence is as much a sin as competence without confidence.

Peter Tremayne

Only a fool lies brooding over his problems. When the morning comes he's tired out and his problems are the same as before.

Robert Lyndon

Chronicling the mid-1970s up session with Gerald Ford's clumsiness, the author quotes a medieval maxim that the king has two bodies. The head of state has a physical body like everyone else, but he also represents the body politic, either reflecting its majesty or its weakness.

Rick Perlstein

It’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions - you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism.

Noam Chomsky

Is there a word for adults when they aren't parents?"Steppa laughs. "Folks with other things to do?""Like what things?""Jobs, I guess. Friends. Trips. Hobbies.

Emma Donoghue

Burr had the dark and severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the forehead and dark brown, almost black, eyes that suggested a cross between an eagle and a raven. Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair, all of which came together to suggest an animated beam of light to Burr’s somewhat stationary shadow.

Joseph J. Ellis

I like a highland friend who will stand by me not only when I am in the right but when I am a little in the wrong.

Sir Walter Scott

Moynihan, when he was ambassador to the United Nations, produced the same effect when he attacked the Third World. These attacks aroused great admiration here; for example, when he denounced Idi Amin of Uganda as a "racist murderer." The question is not whether Idi Amin is a racist murderer. No doubt the appellation is correct. The question is, what does it mean for Moynihan to make this accusation and for others to applaud his honesty and courage in doing so? Who is Moynihan? He served in four administrations, those of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford - that is to say, administrations that were guilty of racist murder on a scale undreamed of by Idi Amin. Imagine that some minor functionary of the Third Reich had correctly accused someone of being a racist murderer.

Noam Chomsky

Magnesium deficiency can produce symptoms of anxiety or depression, including muscle weakness, fatigue, eye twitches, insomnia, anorexia, apathy, apprehension, poor memory, confusion, anger, nervousness, and rapid pulse.

Carolyn Dean

I desired to praise the Chosen One and was hinderedBy my own inability to grasp the extent of his glory.How can one such as I measure an ocean, when the ocean is vast?And how can one such as I count the stones and the stars?If all of my limbs were to become tongues, even then –Even then I could not begin to praise him as I desired.And if all of creation gathered together in an attemptTo praise him, even then they would stint in his due.I have altogether ceased trying – awestruck, clinging to courtesy,Tempered by timidity, glorifying his most exalted rank.Indeed, sometimes silence holds within it the essence of eloquence,And often speech merely fodder for the faultfinder.

Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi

Many lessons can be learned from the history of Western civilization, but one of them is especially clear. Lack of involvement in the affairs of one's society can lead to a sense of powerlessness. In an age that is often crisis-laden and chaotic, an understanding of our Western heritage and its lessons can be instrumental in helping us create new models for the future. For we are all creators of history, and the future of Western and indeed world civilization depends on us.

Jackson J. Spielvogel

The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change.

Howard Zinn

Every tub must stand on its own bottom.

Thomas Fuller

How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realize some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realize this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realize this possibility. Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behavior, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist.

Yuval Noah Harari

The revolutionary woman knows the world she seeks to overthrow is precisely one in which love between equal human beings is well nigh impossible. We are still part of the ironical working-out of this, our own cruel contradiction. One of the most compelling facts which can unite women and make us act is the overwhelming indignity or bitter hurt of being regarded as simply ‘the other’, ‘an object’, ‘commodity’, ‘thing’. We act directly from a consciousness of the impossibility of loving or being loved without distortion. But we must still demand now the preconditions of what is impossible at the moment. It is a most disturbing dialectic, our praxis of pain.

Sheila Rowbotham

For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.

Hilaire Belloc

Talent is always conscious of its own abundance and does not object to sharing.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Be good sweet maid and let who can be clever.

Charles Kingsley

If we do not redefine manhood, war is inevitable.

Paul Fussell

Despair is for people who know, beyond any doubt, what the future is going to bring. Nobody is in that position. So despair is not only a kind of sin, theologically, but also a simple mistake, because nobody actually knows. In that sense there is always hope.

Patrick Curry

And even when success comes, as I am sure it will, bear in mind that there are more quiet and enviable joys than to be among the most sought after women at a ball...

Blanche Wiesen Cook

The 19th century had chosen only to remember the happy warrior. The 20th century only the blood come gargling. Both are essential to any understanding of Trafalgar.

Adam Nicolson

The health care bill is nothing about health care- it's about controlling the people.

David Lincoln

Though Moltke was working with subordinates who were totally lacking in comprehension for whatever strategic plans he may have entertained and who on occasion abused the independence granted them, those plans were sufficiently flexible to accommodate errors; that is, a large safety margin was left to ensure that mistakes would not develop into catastrophes.

Martin van Creveld

It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause

David Hume

It's nice to be liked, but it's better to be respected.

Habeeb Akande

What man would have courage enough to believe he could win you? Bosque laughed. "You exude power. Men are small creatures, easily cowed by those who challenge their sense of self-importance.

Andrea Cremer

The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity was not the result of some obscurely accepted law of retaliation. It was the effect, in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power: of a power that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations; of a power that asserted itself as an armed power whose functions of maintaining order were not entirely unconnected with the functions of war; of a power that presented rules and obligations as personal bonds, a breach of which constituted an offence and called for vengeance; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility, the first sign of rebellion, which is not in principle different from civil war; of a power that had to demonstrate not why it enforced its laws, but who were its enemies, and what unleashing of force threatened them; of a power which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations; of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as 'super-power'.

Michel Foucault

Adams looks forward to teaching his granddaughters about planting trees, noting that they already show inclination toward this and need only be encouraged in the naturalist pursuits he has found so healthy.

Paul C. Nagel

I understood the life around me better, not from love, which everybody acknowledges to be a great teacher, but from estrangement, to which nobody has attributed the power of reinforcing insight

Nirad C. Chaudhuri

...he was not so much a human as a civil war.

H.G.Wells

At present", Keynes said in 1926, "everything is politics, and nothing policies.

Richard Davenport-Hines

In his last years Linacre gave up medicine for the Church and then for the first time read the gospels. On so doing he exclaimed, 'Either this is not the gospel or we are not Christians.

Roland H. Bainton

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.

Philip Guedalla

Get good counsel before you begin: and when you have decided act promptly.

Sallust

Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves," said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word "track" in Tibetan: shul, "a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by - a footprint for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night.

Rebecca Solnit

The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the build environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted- all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.

John R. Stilgoe

In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.

Rebecca Solnit

I feel like a failure." The expression comes so naturally that we forget it is a figure of speech: the language of business applied to the soul.

Scott A. Sandage

I wish I were rich enough to endow a prize for the sensible traveler: £10,000 for the first man to over Marco Polo’s outward route, reading three fresh books a week, and another £10,000 if he a drinks a bottle of wine a day as well. That man might tell one something about the journey. He might or might not be naturally observant. But at least he would use what eyes he had, and would not think it necessary to dress up the result in thrills that never happened and science no deeper than its own jargon.

Robert Byron

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

Michael Shermer

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

What was the fun of being upper-class if you had to work so hard to appear bored all the time?

Troy Soos

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