Quotes by Historians - Page 17

The historian, predisposed to verbal evidence, who reads about rather than looks at objects, becomes dependent upon secondhand impressions and is helpless when critics disagree or interpose their own extraneous judgments between the work and the viewer.

Oscar Handlin

If you run after two hares you will catch neither.

Thomas Fuller

A good horse should be seldom spurred.

Thomas Fuller

A "centrally planned economy" by definition discourages and despises participation by the masses. It's a bureaucratic oligarchy.

A.E. Samaan

...it is crucial to realize that an once of student affairs administration prevention can stave off a pound of lawyers.

Peter F. Lake

And now the bad Mommy was here – outside his window. With a little whimper, he ran back to the bed, jumped in, and pulled the covers over his head.Good Mommy was gone now…and bad Mommy had come to eat him up.

Alan Kinross

To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.

Robert Conquest

Probably everything in my life comes back to a feeling of abandonment, and this city never abandons you.

Ann Douglas

Here then we are first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts, which every nation gives of its origin.

David Hume

It's the way some men say, 'I'm not the problem' or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exasperated woman remarked to me, 'What do they want--a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women?

Rebecca Solnit

Physicians of the Utmost Fame were called at once but when they came they answered as they took their fees 'There is no cure for this disease.'

Hilaire Belloc

One of Lincoln's intimates as a presidential candidate urged him to make no promises and not to part with those kind words which could be interpreted as promises.

Harold Holzer

No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal.

Nancy Isenberg

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Thucydides

To learn of the existence of other lesbians through the media, no matter how unfortunate those characters were, must have been reassuring to women who loved other women.

Lillian Faderman

I learned that time manages the most painful partings for us. One has only to set the date, buy the ticket, and let the earth, sun, and moon make their passages through the sky, until inexorable time carries us with it to the moment of parting.

Jill Ker Conway

Their lifelong love of learning, their remarkable wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was fostered primarily by their father. He read aloud to them at night, eliciting their responses to works of history and literature. He organized amateur plays for them, encourage pursuit of special interests, prompted them to write essays on their readings, and urge them to recite poetry.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

The way to stop financial "joy-riding" is to arrest the chauffeur not the automobile.

Woodrow Wilson

When people speak of great men, they think of men like Napoleon - men of violence. Rarely do they think of peaceful men. But contrast the reception they will receive when they return home from their battles. Napoleon will arrive in pomp and in power, a man who's achieved the very summit of earthly ambition. And yet his dreams will be haunted by the oppressions of war. William Wilberforce, however, will return to his family, lay his head on his pillow and remember: the slave trade is no more.

Charles Fox

You know and we know, as practical men that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength and that the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

Thucydides

The implicit optimism of the [field service post card] is worth noting—the way it offers no provision for transmitting news like “I have lost my left leg” or “I have been admitted into hospital wounded and do not expect to recover.” Because it provided no way of saying “I am going up the line again,” its users had to improvise. Wilfred Owen had an understanding with his mother that when he used a double line to cross out “I am being sent down to the base,” he meant he was at the front again. Close to brilliant is the way the post card allows one to admit to no state of health between being “quite” well, on the one hand, and, on the other, being so sick that one is in hospital.

Paul Fussell

I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty. But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best and be his best.

Woodrow Wilson

[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event.

Michel Foucault

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.

James Gleick

To be or not to be?' That is not the question. What is the question? The question is not one of being, but of becoming. 'To become more or not to become more' This is the question faced by each intelligence in our universe.

Truman G. Madsen

Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both have the same character of being an imaginative speculation. I say all this because I want very much to talk about the human side of discovery and progress, and it seems to me terribly important to say this in an age in which most non-scientists are feeling a kind of loss of nerve.

Jacob Bronowski

I liked the thought that the book I was now holding had been held by dozens of others.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

The race of mankind would perish did they cease to aid each other. We cannot exist without mutual help. All therefore that need aid have a right to ask it from their fellow man and no one who has the power of granting can refuse it without guilt.

Sir Walter Scott

John D Rockefeller read his Bible religiously, but kept his ledger in a different drawer.

H.W. Brands

But they also awarded a quite respectable 55th place to Enoch Powell, thereby demonstrating that, for certain sections of the population, being an unpleasant racist constitutes no bar to greatness.

Marc Morris

Until that moment she had not really noticed him. Now she felt as though she'd stubbed her toe on a rock, and looked down to find that it was part of a buried city.

Gillian Bradshaw

We are graced with a godlike ability to transcend time and space in our minds but are chained to death.

Russell Shorto

Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.

Isaiah Berlin

Teddy Roosevelt "had relished "every hour" of every day as president. Indeed, (he was) fearing the "dull thud" he would experience upon returning to private life.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even if she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family.

Philippa Gregory

So many important New York musicians were gay, one wit dubbed the American Composers League the Homintern.

Charles Kaiser

The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.

Barbara W. Tuchman

War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace.

Philippa Gregory

Humor and seriousness can be an unstable mix.

Richard Brookhiser

A coward's fear can make a coward valiant.

Thomas Fuller

Big Government' is a lot less like a 'Big Brother', and a lot more like a mother-in-law.

A.E. Samaan

At the door, there was one of those moment when two people realize that they like each other more than they know each other. This is nicer than the opposite situation, but more awkward. You try to remember the protocol for touching. You hate to gush, or presume to much, yet you are unwilling to let the moment pass without without some gesture

Emma Donoghue

It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.

Woodrow Wilson

The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.

Noam Chomsky

...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Jared Diamond

We think of 1789 as the date of the French Revolution, and the storming of the Bastille as its defining event. Yet as late as halfway through 1792, most of the familiar images of the revolution had yet to occur. Louis XVI was still king, and the Assembly was negotiating a new constitutional arrangement for the monarchy, not so different from Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Mike Jay

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. A free society fertilizes the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.

Henry Steele Commager

The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of "perversions." Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.

Michel Foucault

Live as long as you may the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.

Robert Southey

History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

Timothy Snyder

Were revolutions ever really that we thought them to be?

Rebecca Solnit

Knowledge can never imprison you, but you can be captive to your ignorance.

A.E. Samaan

Where are we as a modern civilization if our educational institutions conspire to train only a fraction of our capacities? and if this is all they can really do, then why not acknowledge that fact openly and give legitimacy to the other alternative forms of education that do cultivate those neglected dimensions of personality, instead of pretending that anything lying outside the standards set by the Wester analytic tradition is either inferior, anti-intellectual, or diabolic? (p. 293-294)

Eugene Taylor

It is only when I dally with what I am about look back and aside instead of keeping my eyes straight forward that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart.

Sir Walter Scott

I think maybe the classic formulation was by David Hume in "Of the First Principles of Government," where he pointed out that "Force is always on the side of the governed." Whether it's a military society, a partially free society, or what we - not he - would call a totalitarian state, it's the governed who have the power. And the rulers have to find ways to keep them from using their power. Force has its limits, so they have to use persuasion. They have to somehow find ways to convince people to accept authority. If they aren't able to do that, the whole thing is going to collapse.

Noam Chomsky

God has given you a gift, why not open it?!

Habeeb Akande

In the Balkans the peasants say that if you long for faraway countries and leave your own land and home to find them, you are born under A LILAC-BLEEDING STAR.

Lesley Blanch

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Whoever is trying to bring you down is already beneath you.

Habeeb Akande

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