Quotes by Historians - Page 15

A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.

Shelby Foote

You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it

James Gleick

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.

Henry Adams

...Jesus saw the eternal in the everyday. Your last day on earth should be spent as you spent all your others-- doing your daily tasks with love and honesty... An ordinary day is, perhaps, the most holy of all.

Margaret George

One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed "God knows which was right.

Carl Sandburg

There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities such as More Bacon Grotius Pascal Cromwell Bossuet Montesquieu Jefferson Napoleon Pitt etc. The result would be an Encyclopedia of Errors.

Lord Acton

Count your blessings and be grateful not a great fool.

Habeeb Akande

Could a being create the fifty billion galaxieseach with two hundred billion starsthen rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?

Ron Patterson

The difference between one man and another is not mere ability ... it is energy.

Thomas Arnold

Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.

Michel Foucault

If you truly love someone, you will cherish what they despise most about themselves" - Fernando Conclaves

Deborah Harkness

God makes and apparel shapes: but it's money that finishes the man.

Thomas Fuller

The moment that we think we know, we’ve lost our perspective on wisdom.

Diana Butler Bass

In every sphere of social interaction, that hermeneutic leap—that ability to put yourself in the mind frame of the other—is a virtue and a blessing.

Ted Gioia

Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.

Rebecca Solnit

Let us banish fear. We have been in this mental state for three centuries. I am a radical. I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me.

Carter G. Woodson

Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.

Thomas Carlyle

These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

Henry Adams

Jack Kennedy protected a mature and presidential image – tough, yet not unduly combative.

David Pietrusza

I wonder sometimes what would happen if victory was imagined not just as the elimination of evil but the establishment of good...

Rebecca Solnit

Now according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be unnecessary because of imaginary bombings

Barbara W. Tuchman

Most leaders are indispensable but to produce a major social change many ordinary people must also be involved.

Anne Firor Scott

No zek had the right to stay one second in his workroom without the supervision of a free employee because prudence dictated that the prisoner would be bound to use that unsupervised second to break into the steel safe with a lead pencil, photograph its secret documents with a trouser button, explode an atom bomb, and fly to the moon.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.

Carl Sandburg

The chances of anything man-like on Mars are a million to one

H.G.Wells

Quality - in its classic Greek sense - how to live with grace and intelligence with bravery and mercy.

Theodore H. White

Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature-the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself.

Dee Brown

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!

Jared Diamond

Steampunk is Victorian science fiction

G.D. Falksen

Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation’s history?

Philip Dray

That's just like the manual says,' said Witherwax. "If we want to have international brotherhood, we gotta get a language that everybody understands all the time.''You mean with no homonyms?' said Doc Brenner.Mr. Gross belched again, and held up two fingers to indicate another Boilermaker. 'Are you saying that the language a fella speaks can make a fairy of him?' ("Gin Comes In Bottles")

Fletcher Pratt

No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood.

Timothy Snyder

A piece of advice his father had given him surfaced in Edgar's mind. Sometimes, he had said, it's better just to keep quiet and think with your heart.

Sharan Newman

We always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It was Matthews, of course, for whom the verdict was the greatest disaster. Not only had he failed to escape from Bedlam, but the anomalies of the case made it highly unlikely that he would have the chance to appeal again. His family and friends had assembled an impeccable case, most of which had been ignored.

Mike Jay

We can only suppose that Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not. A well known modem writer on the subject has remarked that “Buddhism in its purity ignored the existence of a God; it denied the existence of a soul; it was not so much a religion as a code of ethics”. We can understand the appeal of this on the one hand to the rationalist and on the other to the sentimentalist. Unfortunately for these, all three statements arc untrue, at least in the sense in which they are meant. It is with another Buddhism than this that we arc in sympathy and are able to agree; and that is the Buddhism of the texts as they stand.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will make it more rather than less painful because it will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.

René Girard

It is more disgraceful for a king to tell lies than anyone else.

Arrian

I have not done enough for effect." Horace Greeley

Harold Holzer

Capitalists grow wealth. Socialists redistribute wealth.... but population grows, so the Socialist population control kicks in in the form of eugenics.

A.E. Samaan

I had a desire to see something besides my own shores, if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.

Margaret George

Hold on to your periwigs, I'm going to start you off with a whirlwind tour of the history of Stuart Britain; a time that encompassed the vast majority of the seventeenth century and the first fourteen years of the eighteenth.

Andrea Zuvich

A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.

Rebecca Solnit

Everybody's entitled to that forty acres and a mule. You're going to do the work, but you have to have something to work with. If you don't have a job, where do you go from there? You hear people say Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you don't even have shoes. You're barefooted. What are you going to pull yourself up by? Our country owes every citizen of the United States of America a means of livelihood. Not a handout, but a way to make it.

Studs Terkel

The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

Rebecca Solnit

Adversity is like the period of the rain ... cold comfortless unfriendly to man and to animal yet from that season have their birth the flower the fruit the date the rose and the pomegranate.

Sir Walter Scott

It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.

Michel Foucault

If Jesus had been an actual historical figure we have a thorny paradox. Either this Jesus was a remarkable individual who said and did a host of amazing, revolutionary things – but no one outside his fringe cult noticed for over a century. Or he didn’t – and yet shortly after his death, tiny communities of worshipers that cannot agree about the most basic facts of his life spring up, scattered all across the empire. The truth is inescapable: there simply could never have been a historical Jesus.

David Fitzgerald

I took my line straight away. I knew I was staking everything, but I jumped there and then. "We're on absolutely the biggest thing that has ever been invented," I said, and put the accent on "we." "If you want to keep me out of this, you'll have to do it with a gun. I'm coming down to be your fourth labourer to-morrow.

H.G.Wells

He had existed for a long time and was fluent in many languages - most of them…dead ones.

Alan Kinross

The task of defending capitalism was still important to leave to the capitalists.

Rick Perlstein

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

Wallace Stegner

Often ignored by civil rights historians, a number of campaigns led to trials and even convictions throughout the South. These cases, many virtually unknown, broke with Southern tradition and fractured the philosophical and political foundations of white supremacy by challenging the relationship between sexual domination and racial equality.

Danielle L. McGuire

It has been more wittily than charitably said that hell is paved with good intentions. They have their place in heaven also.

Robert Southey

Woodrow Wilson intimate Edward House urged that his boss never first be approached by argument. Instead, the President could be made most receptive by laying a groundwork of 'common hatred".

David Pietrusza

I may have had moments of regret in my life, but you know, they wouldn't add up to an hour.

Emma Donoghue

James Tilly Matthews was not a prophet. He was a gifted, perhaps fragile individual who suffered intensely, and for little if any reward.

Mike Jay

We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it's almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.

Rebecca Solnit

Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially those which are fruitful" - Abu Bak's warfare rules, to his army

Firas Alkhateeb

We choose our favourite author as we do our friend, from a conformity of humour and disposition. Mirth or passion, sentiment or reflection; whichever of these most predominates in our temper, it gives us a peculiar sympathy with the writer who resembles us.

David Hume

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