Quotes by Historians - Page 13

I am fit to capture a unicorn, and I should not be so questioned.

Philippa Gregory

God to be God must transcend what is. He must be the maker of what ought to be.

Rufus M. Jones

Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.

David Hume

It turns out there is something worse than attending a wedding where you don't know anyone: attending a wedding where you know six people, and they are all your ex-husband's best friends.

Lauren F. Winner

...we can endure neither our vices nor the remedies needed to cure them.

Livy

Everything good is good because of the love it contains.

John K. Brown

To do things today exactly the way you did them yesterday saves thinking.

Woodrow Wilson

Stuff comes and stuff goes and the only thing that matters in the end is who you are inside, what you do and what make it leaves in the world.

Claire Cross

Christianity is the only major religion to have at its central event the humiliation of its God.

Bruce L. Shelley

We have more to fear from the opinions of our friends than the bayonets of our enemies." Politician turned Union General Nathaniel Banks, in plea he couldn't abandon an untenable position.

Shelby Foote

The two grappled in the quiet of old-fashioned personal diplomacy.

Paul C. Nagel

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

Gerald Brenan

...it was not considered right for a man not to drink, although drink was a dangerous thing. On the contrary, not to drink would have been thought a mark of cowardice and of incapacity for self-control. A man was expected even to get drunk if necessary, and to keep his tongue and his temper no matter how much he drank. The strong character would only become more cautious and more silent under the influence of drink; the weak man would immediately show his weakness. I am told the curious fact that in the English army at the present day officers are expected to act very much after the teaching of the old Norse poet; a man is expected to be able on occasion to drink a considerable amount of wine or spirits without showing the effects of it, either in his conduct or in his speech. "Drink thy share of mead; speak fair or not at all" - that was the old text, and a very sensible one in its way.

Eoghan Odinsson

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

H.A.L. Fisher

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Carl Sandburg

I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended.

Barbara W. Tuchman

So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs.

H.G.Wells

Additionally, many widows took over family shops or businesses- and, not uncommonly, ran them better than their dead husbands. Y.pestis [black death germ] turns out to have been something of a feminist.

John Kelly

An effort was made to spread this new materialist atheism with its Communist consequence "by the sword" (as the metaphor goes), that is, by the invasion of neighboring countries with consequent further massacres and the extension of the area of despotic Soviet control... This armed attempt at expansion was checked by Catholic Poland, the most immediately exposed victim, in what has been called "one of the decisive battles of the world.

Hilaire Belloc

The argument that there are just wars often rests on the social system of the nation engaging in war. It is supposed that if a ‘liberal’ state is at war with a ‘totalitarian’ state, then the war is justified. The beneficent nature of a government was assumed to give rightness to the wars it wages.t...Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were liberals, which gave credence to their words exalting the two world wars, just as the liberalism of Truman made going into Korea more acceptable and the idealism of Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society gave an early glow of righteousness to the war in Vietnam.tWhat the experience of Athens suggests is that a nation may be relatively liberal at home and yet totally ruthless abroad. Indeed, it may more easily enlist its population in cruelty to others by pointing to the advantages at home. An entire nation is made into mercenaries, being paid with a bit of democracy at home for participating in the destruction of life abroad.

Howard Zinn

Above all others I pity the homeless: where can they go to masturbate?

Robert Clark

If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.

Barbara W. Tuchman

The uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf. It's almost a law.

H.G.Wells

She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren't the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.

Caleb Carr

We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides.

Adam Nicolson

Does this mean that religious consumption will increase online? That could be. We do not know yet, but to expect religion to disappear because of online technology is like expecting people to stop listening to music because Napster, Spotify and Wimp are offering us all the music we want online

Torkel Brekke

It was Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic priest and professor, who earned the title of father of international law.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy.

Isaac Deutscher

Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.

Drew Gilpin Faust

As history has shown, any new computing device capable of running a game will, by hook or by crook, soon have them available. (aka, the "Loguidice Law")

Bill Loguidice Matt Barton

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

H.G.Wells

The Yale graduate who had refused to read outside the course curriculum (the future Pres. Taft) suddenly found himself inspired.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

We are the children of the earth and removed from her our spirit withers.

George Macaulay Trevelyan

You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Wise men profit more by fools than fools by wise men.

Marcus Porcius Cato

Sixty years is too brief a compass for man’s imagination. The incomplete joys of this world can never satisfy his heart.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the whole world through the relation of supply and demand—a relation which, as an English economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires, causes nations to rise and to disappear—while with the abolition of the basis of private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again?

Karl Marx

Samuel FB Morse's SECOND question over the telegraph was, "Have you any news?

Harold Holzer

Lilith opened the shutters and allowed herself to bathe in the bright moonlight, as it shone across the Highland Glen.

Alan Kinross

Having money will make you look enticing to women even if you are not a good-looking dude. Don’t believe me, go ask Mick Jagger, Donald Trump, Jay-Z and the rest of the fugly men who have all the money and get all the fine women.

Rebecca Scott

Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

Rick Perlstein

Goodbye, Room." I wave up at Skylight. "Say goodbye," I tell Ma. "Goodbye, Room."Ma says it but on mute.I look back one more time. It's like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out the door.

Emma Donoghue

Philosophy goes no further than probabilities and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.

James Froude

The subject of British abolitionism has long been controversial, complex, and even baffling. It also raises the issue of moral progress in history - whether groups of reformers and even nations can succeed in eliminating deeply entrenched forms of human oppression, and if so, by what methods, misconceptions, and under what conditions?

David Brion Davis

The most perfect happiness, surely, must arise from the contemplation of the most perfect object.

David Hume

Great wealth can make a man no happier than moderate means, unless he has the luck to continue in propsperity to the end. Many very rich men have been unfortunate, and many with a modest competence have had good luck. The former are better off than the latter in two respects only, whereas the poor but lucky man has the advantage in many ways; for though the rich have the means to satisfy their appetites and to bear calamities, and the poor have not, the poor, if they are lucky, are more likely to keep clear of trouble, and will have besides the blessings of a sound body, health, freedom from trouble, fine children, and good looks.Now if a man thus favoured died as he has lived, he will be just the one you are looking for: the only sort of person who deserves to be called happy. But mark this: until he is dead, keep the word “happy” in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky.

Herodotus

An ethnic minority can live in peace with an ethnic majority as long as the majority does not use its preponderance to turn the institutions of the state into an instrument of ethnic favoritism or ethnic justice.

Michael Ignatieff

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.

Karl Marx

Riches enlarge rather than satisfy appetites.

Thomas Fuller

You can get to oppression through regulation, especially in an "Idea Economy" which necessitates liberty of the mind to explore.

A.E. Samaan

The strategic center of the rebellion was not a place – not New York, Philadelphia, not the Hudson corridor – but the Continental Army itself.

Joseph J. Ellis

A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?Two things result from this fact.I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be in itself a power.II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.

Karl Marx

Maybe the word forgive points in the wrong direction, since it's something you mostly give yourself, not anyone else: you put down the ugly weight of old suffering, untie yourself from the awful, and walk away from it.

Rebecca Solnit

The world, I tell you, is bored -- bored now to the explosive pitch. It's bored by all this incessant war preparation. It is bored by aimless violence, now here, now there. It is tired of hatred politics. It's tired of fresh murders every day. It is not indignant, not excited; it is bored. Bored and baffled..."I don't believe a man begins to know anything of politics until he realises the immense menace of mental fatigue, of world-wide mass boredom. It accumulates. It makes the most frightful convulsions and demoralisation possible. It makes them at last inevitable. Nobody wants fundamental changes in a world where hope and interest prevail. Then people accept their careers, settle down to them, rear children. But throw them out of work, in and out and no sense of security, deprive them of bright expectations, regiment them in masses, underfeed them, bore them with organised mass patriotism, and they begin to seep together into a common morass of discontent and impatience. Almost unconsciously..."They're like that now.

H.G.Wells

He knew clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the sailors, the wide sea, were all part of a filmy phantasmagoria that hung, scarcely veiling it, between him and a horrible real world. Then the Porroh man, thrusting his diabolical face through that curtain, was the one real and undeniable thing. At that he would get up and touch things, taste something, gnaw something, burn his hand with a match, or run a needle into himself.("Pollock And The Porrah Man")

H.G.Wells

I was disinterested in everything, even in Ethan. Even, I was ashamed to admit, in Ella. I didn’t know where else I wanted to be but I knew it was anywhere except on this earth, in my body, living my life.

Leslie A. Gordon

My early and invincible love of reading--I would not exchange for the treasures of India.

Edward Gibbon

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

James Gleick

I speak of new cities and new peopleI tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down,a sun dropped in the west.I tell you there is nothing in the worldonly an ocean of tomorrows.a sky of tomorrows.I am a brother of the cornhuskers who sayat sundown:Tomorrow is a day.”- Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers

Carl Sandburg

He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.

H.G.Wells

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