Quotes by Historians - Page 14

The crash did not cause the Depression: that was part of a far broader malaise. What it did was expose the weaknesses that underpinned the confidence and optimism of the 1920s - poor distribution of income, a weak banking structure and insufficient regulations, the economy's dependence on new consumer goods, the over-extension of industry and the Government's blind belief that promoting business interests would make America uniformly prosperous.

Lucy Moore

But he also knew this centurion, this man of honour, would change her…by giving her love…and love was the most powerful force in the universe.

Alan Kinross

Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.

Rebecca Solnit

You can either have individual liberty, or dependence on the government. One is designed to undo the other.

A.E. Samaan

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

John William Draper

...it is not enough to be freeof the whips, principalities and powers

Edward Kamau Brathwaite

For most singers the first half of the career involves extending one's repertoire the second half trimming it.

Ethan Mordden

Disappointments are to the soul what a thunder-storm is to the air.

Friedrich von Schiller

We . . . go out into the Waste Land of Experts, each knowing so much about so little that he can neither be contradicted nor is worth contradicting.

G.M. Young

To his own children he was at once the ultimate voice of authority and, when time allowed, their most exuberant companion. He never fired their imaginations or made them laugh as their mother could, but he was unfailingly interested in them, sympathetic, confiding, entering into their lives in ways few fathers ever do. It was a though he was in league with them.

David McCullough

Temptations come as a general rule when they are sought.

Margaret Oliphant

In the ancient and medieval world, the exploration of physical influences among heavenly bodies, and between the heavenly bodies and objects on earth, was generally called ‘astrology.’ But we must not confuse this with the current socially acceptable form of bigotry that seems to entitle the human beings who believe in it to prejudge the character of others based solely on their dates of birth.

Robert P. Crease

Now, these eager and apprehensive men of small property constitute the class which is constantly increased by the equality of conditions. Hence, in democratic communities, the majority of the people do not clearly see what they have to gain by a revolution, but they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one.

Alexis de Tocqueville

A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.

Rick Perlstein

I realize that I can laugh, that it is possible to be happy, that laughter and hope can come back to me.

Philippa Gregory

A wise man may look ridiculous in the company of fools.

Thomas Fuller

It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest....

Jan Morris

The mid-19th century was noted for a partisan, rather than a consensus press, but this partisanship was able to turn out voters consistently.

Harold Holzer

When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses […]. ‘The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories,’ he said.

Michel de Certeau

The usual fiction – that the war would involve precision targeting and the careful avoidance of civilian deaths – was stated by Tony Blair at the beginning of the war. After similar bombing campaigns against Yugoslavia and Iraq, Blair was by now acting as virtual White House spokesperson, providing the pretence of an 'international coalition' in what was clearly a US war. This role was more important than Britain's military contribution, which in the early days of the bombing campaign was token and probably of no military value. The British army did later prove useful, however, when it was...

Mark Curtis

We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness and the uncertainty with which human beings, in the end, live and die.

Boria Sax

The reformer," Douglass explained in 1883, had "a difficult and disagreeable task before him. He has to part with old friends; break away from the beaten paths of society, and advance against the vehement protests of the most sacred sentiments of the human heart.

James Oakes

Harun AlRashid known for his wealth & diplomatic relations, sent an embassy to France that included an elephant & a water clock

Firas Alkhateeb

The idea that fast reading is good reading is a twentieth-century weed, springing out of the stony farmland cultivated by the computer manufacturers.

Susan Wise Bauer

Theodore Roosevelt came to Dekota to experience the dying of one age with the slaying of a rare buffalo and the dawning of the West's industrial age.

H.W. Brands

As soon as (Teddy Roosevelt) received an assignment for a paper or project, he would set to work, never leaving anything to the last minute. Prepared so far ahead "freed his mind" from worry and facilitated fresh, lucid thought.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. It's accelerative. The more we know, the more we want to know.

David McCullough

The king's "only interest in government was a pious but simpleminded desire for reproachment

Dan Jones

During Uthman's caliphate, a Muslim embassy was sent to China to establish diplomatic relations

Firas Alkhateeb

Statism is political fashion.Individual liberty is eternal.

A.E. Samaan

All of yesterday's ballers are today's road sweepers.

Habeeb Akande

He turned the presidency – and the President's House – into something it had not been before: a center of curiosity and inquiry, of vibrant institution that played informal but important roles in the broader life of the nation, from science to literature.

Jon Meacham

The sacralization of the party opened the way to the sacralization of Stalin when he became the supreme leader. After 1929, the political religion of Russia mainly concentrated on the deification of Stalin, who until his death in 1953 dominated the party and Soviet system like a tyrannical and merciless deity.

Emilio Gentile

Reason is the triumph of the intellect faith of the heart.

James Schouler

Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own.

Barbara W. Tuchman

We have hands that must work, brains that must think, and personalities that must be developed.

Jill Lepore

I insist that the question of the future is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and difficulties of the present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future

W.E.B. Du Bois

What Douglas had once seen as the attractive over-confidence of youth, now looked more like unyielding selfishness.

Len Deighton

The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal impulse of the devil in the soul--lust.

Marina Warner

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

Karl Marx

There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own.They are the lordly ones! They come in all colors.They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists.They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor.They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists.They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humor and understanding.When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically.They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean.They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion, or political correctness.They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it.It is the nation of nowhere.

Jan Morris

To the traveller imbued with a feeling for the historical and poetical, so inseparately interwined in the annals of romantic Spain, the Alhambra is a much an object of devotion as is the Caaba to all true Moslems. How many legends and traditions, true and fabulous, - how many songs and ballards, Arabian and Spanish, of love and war and chivalry, are associated with this Oriental pile!

Washington Irving

...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.

Michael Ignatieff

I had only four hairs worth shaving, but I managed to inflict five cuts attempting to remove them.

Troy Soos

Freedom without limits is when you choose to be a Bondman for "JESUS".... Sounds funny but it is the fact as well as the Truth

Thomas Sam

Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.

Gordon S. Wood

I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it - from The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Hitherto men have always formed wrong ideas about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relations according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The products of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.

Karl Marx

The daddy-at-home theory posits that concealed ovulation evolved to promote monogamy, to force the man to stay home, and thus to bolster his certainty about his paternity of his wife's children. The many-fathers theory instead posits that concealed ovulation evolved to give the women access to many sex partners and thus to leave many men uncertain as to whether they sired her children.

Jared Diamond

Regulated" rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government.

A.E. Samaan

I will never take what is never given, but I will receive to what is given.

Michael Jones

Rebelling against the status quo was one of the definitions of conservatism.

Rick Perlstein

No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

Thomas Carlyle

The lamp of genius burns quicker than the lamp of life.

Friedrich von Schiller

No man can be a Christian and a soldier at the same time, for the two ideas are wholly incompatible.

W.E. Woodward

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Howard Zinn

For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real.

Richard Rhodes

Matthew kept hinting that his desire - for blood, chiefly- was so strong that it put everything else at risk. But vampires weren’t the only creatures who had to manage such strong impulses. Much of what qualified as magic was simply desire in action. Witchcraft was different- that took spells and rituals. But magic? A wish, a need, a hunger too strong to be denied- these could turn into deeds when they cross a witch’s mind.

Deborah Harkness

To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]

David McCullough

I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.

Howard Zinn

Previous 1 … 12 13 14 15 16 … 20 Next