Quotes by Historians - Page 12

Communism is what happens when Socialists realize that they want complete control over every aspect of human life.

A.E. Samaan

The life-changing encounters that John Quincy Adams made as an adolescent on his own in Stockholm began with a friendship he struck up at a bookstore.

Paul C. Nagel

Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the “avant-garde” - to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored.

Mircea Eliade

The author characterizes Hamilton's tone in the Federalist papers by saying that he never spoke of problems but of being at the last stage in the crisis.

John Ferling

To be honest one must be inconsistent.

H.G.Wells

I think, therefore I am an individual... not a drone in a collective. I think, therefore I am... Libertarian.

A.E. Samaan

To die this way seems so random, so trivial. I have been robbed of meaning before being robbed of life. To die in darkness, alone -- for what purpose was I ever alive. It is as if I emerged from darkness into delusion, then sank back into darkness forever.

Carolyn Ives Gilman

(When told that he is a drunk) My dear, you are ugly; but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly.

Sir Winston Churchill

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.

Will Durant

Balt Van Tassel was an easy indulgent soul; he loved his daughter better even than his pipe, and, like a reasonable man and an excellent father, let her have her way in everything.

Washington Irving

If life were fattening, Walter Cronkite would weigh 500 pounds.

Douglas Brinkley

Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.

Thomas Carlyle

Your father says a wise man can see more from the bottom of a well than a fool can from a mountaintop.

Deborah Harkness

Sex is flagrantly separated from reproduction in a few species, including bonobos and dolphins.

Jared Diamond

But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already a loss.

Rebecca Solnit

Words for completely novel concepts and technical breakthroughs are devised as soon as needed, explained with ease and absorbed with scarcely an effort by all who need them. This ability to innovate in language is crucial to every scientific advance, to our intellectual curiosity, to our originality as human individuals, because it is crucial to our ability to communicate new ideas and discoveries.

Andrew Dalby

Among the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things ... only one, which began a century and a half ago ... has allowed the figure of man to appear.

Michel Foucault

He had to pause for his usual misgivings.

Paul C. Nagel

Author says that, while Eisenhower had other intellectual mentors, he learned how to lead men from Gen. Walter Krueger. Krueger was the first American enlisted man to rise to four-star general, and he so identified with those he led that he once invited a sentry out of the rain and gave him his own dry uniform.

Jean Edward Smith

The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright [Sophocles] says, it 'brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us that which was manifest.' Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion....I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything....

Anna Comnena

We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.

James Gleick

Religious faith depends on a host of social, psychological and emotional factors that have little or nothing to do with probabilities, evidence and logic.

Michael Shermer

That attraction force which always happens between the reader and the book, i adore it when it takes place <3

Marvin Perry

A transference of memory was occurring as she, the vessel, the source, wrung every small, muffled detail into me, the depository. And once it began, it was difficult to interrupt or stop

Aanchal Malhotra

In the present day, when popular literature is running into the low levels of life, and luxuriating on the vices and follies of mankind; and when the universal pursuit of gain is trampling down the early growth of poetic feeling, and wearing out the verdure of the soul, I question whether it would not be of service for the reader occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier modes of thinking; and to steep himself to the very lips in old Spanish romance.

Washington Irving

The point of Christian scholarship is not recognition by standards established in the wider culture. The point is to praise God with the mind. Such efforts will lead to the kind of intellectual integrity that sometimes receives recognition. But for the Christian that recognition is only a fairly inconsequential by-product. The real point is valuing what God has made, believing that the creation is as "good" as he said it was, and exploring the fullest dimensions of what it meant for the Son of God to "become flesh and dwell among us." Ultimately, intellectual work of this sort is its own reward, because it is focused on the only One whose recognition is important, the One before whom all hearts are open.

Mark A. Noll

Such elusive puzzles recall the historian's basic dilemma: the absence of evidence does not always signify evidence of absence. In the end, we will likely never know.

Howard Markel

As you travel around medieval England you will come across a sport described by some contemporaries as 'abominable ... more common, undignified and worthless than any other game, rarely ending but with some loss, accident or disadvantage to the players themselves'. This is football.

Ian Mortimer

Anger is one of the sinners of the soul.

Thomas Fuller

Some models of self-control are able to achieve their serenity easily because the soul fires never burn brightly to begin with.

Joseph J. Ellis

According to accepted newspaper clichés, we all go down fighting. The other day I even read that an 18-month-old baby had died after a long battle with cancer. That has become the mandatory phrase for all who expire, disease-ridden. They battled valiantly; they lost. When I finally depart I hope somebody will write, instead, that I died after a long battle with life.

Pierre Berton

You can't be neutral on a moving train.

Howard Zinn

The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and penal code, the liberté, égalité, fraternité and the second of May 1852—all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a magician. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.

Karl Marx

A strongly accentuated zoophilism, such as an inordinate love of horses or dogs, throws the emotional nature out of balance; and those who are possessed by it are not likely to care very much for people.

W.E. Woodward

Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of dynamos. Between them they have ensured that I shall work hard but they cannot ensure that one shall work at anything worthwhile.

Arnold J. Toynbee

Since the dawn of time, nearly every man (and I'd wager to guess most women) has, at his most visceral level, secretly desired for one thing - to be standing triumphantly atop a heaping pile of his slain enemies, holding a gigantic axe aloft while some unbelievably attractive member of whatever gender he's attracted to desperately clutches his leg like it's the last life raft on the HMS Titanic.

Ben Thompson

...it's only on a black day that you begin to have friends.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is my assertion, however, that the project of remaking humanity and defining identity has been at the core of this century, and that much of this project was characterized by a tremendous destructive urge followed by a long and as yet uncompleted process of coming to terms with the disasters it has produced and is still producing in many parts of the world.

Omer Bartov

The president notices that when he takes off his coat to dig, people take more notice of the visual than they did his preceding remarks.

Paul C. Nagel

How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII

Barbara W. Tuchman

There's nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends.

Hilaire Belloc

Thomas Wollaston, in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, complained that Darwin did no seem to know what a species actually was. The British Quarterly, deliberately sitting up trouble, speculated that a time might come when a monkey could propose marriage to a genteel British lady. Perhaps cruelest of all was a cartoon in Punch magazine, depicting a gorilla with a sign on its neck. Deliberately evoking the anti-slavery tract of Darwin's Wedgwood forbears, the sign read:"Am I a Man and a Brother?

Jonathan Clements

Greater things are believed of those who are absent.

Tacitus

What makes a man move,From comforts left behind,Then put motion toAdventures of the mind.

Dean Cumings

Curiosity evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from the channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent ‘bad’ information from invading and suffocating the ‘good.’ Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.

Michel Foucault

No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe.

Barbara W. Tuchman

The future is hope!

John Fiske

Egotism fears its own self.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Deeply entrenched fantasies and persistent, most cherished illusions can at least partly be explained as ‘bugs’ or ‘viruses’ in, or ‘mis-activations’ of, our sophisticated and highly sensitive intellectual software, which is driven but also easily disrupted by, and addicted to, our restless and insatiable need for meaning, order, control, and reassurance.

Azar Gat

A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.

H.G.Wells

The sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as "substance" and "essence of man," and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as "self-consciousness" and the "Unique.

Karl Marx

Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn’t catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don’t.

Rebecca Solnit

... if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others -- more stringent ones, in fact -- plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil

Noam Chomsky

Mary watched the sunset from her carriage window, realizing that such beauty could never last. Life was a golden glory that faded in the wink of an eye. Life was a village fair that only lasted for a single day. As the carriage rattled along, rocking her like a babe in arms, Mary felt very old and wise. She found that she didn't mind being taken back to the castle, to a caring captivity that was filled with comforts and kindness. And she also found that she couldn't keep her eyes open.

Margaret George

The history of almost every civilization furnishes examples of geographical expansion coinciding with deterioration in quality.

Arnold Toynbee

If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.

Carter G. Woodson

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

Thomas Carlyle

Another heaping portion of shitty life, please. And an extra order of I'll just go fuck myself then, too.

Scott T Goudsward

The following twenty years would be the nadir of American Indian history, as the total Indian population between 1890 and 1910 fell to fewer than 250,000. (It was not until 1917 that Indian births exceeded deaths for the first time in fifty years.)

Kenneth C. Davis

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

James Howell

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