Quotes by Historians - Page 18

Evolution is more about the condition of the heart of a man who does not want to acknowledge God than it is about the facts.

John Yates

We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 million under pressure, the cost of his inauguration and then 350 million under strong international pressure)...but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality... we cannot wish for the seas to dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates ceast to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control... But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish

Rebecca Solnit

Motherhood is still the great unknown. For some, it brings incomparable happiness and enriches their identity. Others manage as best they can to reconcile contradictory demands.

Élisabeth Badinter

The artist has a special task and duty the task of reminding men of their humanity and the promise of their creativity.

Lewis Mumford

Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.

Thomas Carlyle

Then none was for a party;Then all were for the state;Then the great man helped the poor,And the poor man loved the great;Then lands were fairly proportioned;Then spoils were fairly sold;The Romans were like brothersIn the brave days of old.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

There is a certain relief in change even though it be from bad to worse as I have found in traveling in a stagecoach it is often a comfort to shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.

Washington Irving

Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own “real” world in a fresh and truth-bearing light.

Leonard S. Marcus

Over the last 25 years, the major popular movements that have had significant impact on the general society and have changed it, that have had a major civilizing effect – the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and so on – these are mostly developments of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Their roots might be in the activism of the ‘60s, but the movements themselves developed and extended later. The same is true of the changes in respect for other cultures, rights of oppressed people, and so on. These are quite significant changes. If you compare the United States now to what it was, say, 35 years ago, the changes are quite dramatic. These are changes in popular consciousness that are quite deeply embedded.

Noam Chomsky

But you can't be too careful of these strange new ideas and new things. You must not tamper with them. If you try to understand them, they may entangle and get hold of you, and then where will you be? Hide your mind from them, and hide them from your mind. Stick to the plain common sense of life. There will always be a tomorrow rather like today. At least so far there always has been a fairly similar tomorrow. Once or twice lately there have been jolts... Try not to notice these jolts. 'It is no good meeting trouble halfway.

H.G.Wells

Civilization is a movement - not a condition a voyage - not a harbour.

Arnold Toynbee

It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.

Alexis de Tocqueville

This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuateddeity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.

David Hume

The importance of setting a date, as in choosing a colour, is a matter of selection. Orange may be seen equally well as 'the decline and fall of red' or 'the rise and triumph of yellow'.

Donald Thomas

Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Carl Sandburg

This false appearance distinguishes wages labour from other historical forms of labour. On the basis of the wages system even the unpaid labour seems to be paid labour. With the slave, on the contrary, even that part of his labour which is paid appears to be unpaid. Of course, in order to work the slave must live, and one part of his working day goes to replace the value of his own maintenance. But since no bargain is struck between him and his master, and no acts of selling and buying are going on between the two parties, all his labour seems to be given away for nothing.

Karl Marx

The 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was the primary tool used by FDR to keep Jewish refugees from reaching US shores.

A.E. Samaan

What remains of people is what media can store and communicate.

Friedrich A. Kittler

As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.

Yuval Noah Harari

Compassion has been advocated by all the great faiths because it has been found to be the safest and surest means of attaining enlightenment.

Karen Armstrong

People like him, who buried their past so determinedly, should not help it from the grave so easily.

Steve Berry

The Mob essentially created the term 'stand-up comic'—according to eighty-six-year-old comedian Dick Curtis: 'The Outfit used to manage fighters. A stand-up fighter is a guy that is a puncher. A stand-up guy was a guy who was tough and you could depend on. The Outfit managed fighters and they managed clubs that booked comics, so the term found its way into the lexicon of nightclubs. A guy who just stood there and punched jokes—joke, joke, joke—he was a stand-up comic.

Kliph Nesteroff

The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.

Timothy Snyder

Religious discrimination is not like racial discrimination. One you choose for yourself, the other God chose for you.

Habeeb Akande

A person in her twenties has been a child for most of her life, but as time goes by that portion that is childhood becomes smaller and smaller, more and more distant, more and more faded, though they say at the end of life the beginning returns with renewed vividness, as though you had sailed all the way around the world and were going back into the darkness from which you came.

Rebecca Solnit

The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation.

Mark A. Noll

I did not worry about what a man or woman personally believed, but the nation's official religion should be outwardly practiced by all its citizens. A religion was a political statement. Being a Calvinist, a papist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican labeled a person's philosophy on education, taxes, poor relief, and other secular things. The nation needed an accepted position on such concerns. Hence the fines for not outwardly conforming to the national church.

Margaret George

Very few things happen at the right time and the rest do not happen at all the conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Herodotus

Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in the world insincerity is the most dangerous.

James Froude

Some days, I believe the Christian story even more than I believe in Australia. After all, I have never been to Australia, it is just a picture on a map. I don't know if I will ever go there, but I know that eventually I am going to Glory.Living the Christian life, however, is not about that Australia kind of believing. It is about a promise to believe even when you don't.

Lauren F. Winner

We're all weird.

John O'Callaghan

Go for the hum.

Ethan Mordden

[B]eauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears.

Rebecca Solnit

Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.

Stefan Collini

More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort.

Nancy Isenberg

Everybody knows that. The missing step is always the next.

Óscar Lopes

One may picture, too, the sudden shifting of the attention, the swiftly spreading coils and bellyings of that blackness advancing headlong, towering heavenward, turning the twilight to a palpable darkness, a strange and horrible antagonist of vapour striding upon its victims, men and horses near it seen dimly, running, shrieking, falling headlong, shouts of dismay, the guns suddenly abandoned, men choking and writhing on the ground, and the swift broadening-out of the opaque cone of smoke. And then night and extinction – nothing but a silent mass of impenetrable vapour hiding its dead.

H.G.Wells

Eisenhower on LBJ: "He hadn't got the depth of mind nor the breath vision to carry great responsibility.

David Pietrusza

For Southerners, a white skin was the distinguishing badge of mind and intellect. Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers, as what Hammond called the “mudsill” class necessary to support every society.

David Brion Davis

Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches.

Rebecca Solnit

Parents must try to be, or at least put forth their best efforts to be, what they wish [their] children to be. It is impossible for you to be an example of what you are not.

Joseph Fielding Smith

The best that could be left behind by any man: children who had been brought up to behave responsibly and to believe in something beyond their own self gratification. (The Americans

John Jakes

A man surprised is half beaten.

Thomas Fuller

Tender-handed stroke a nettle and it stings you for your pains Grasp it like a man of mettle and it soft as silk remains.

Thomas Fuller

Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.

Rebecca Solnit

It is always darkest just before .the day dawneth.

Thomas Fuller

A fox should not be on the jury at a goose's trial.

Thomas Fuller

Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.

Newt Gingrich

In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, Right, or Center, or whether they are peaceful, reform, violent, non-violent or laissez-faire. Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines.

Harold Cruse

In my opinion, at least, the splendid achievements of Alexander are the clearest possible proof that neither strength of body, nor noble blood, nor success in war even greater than Alexander's own... that none of these things, I say, can make a man happy, unless he can win one more victory in addition to those the world thinks so great---the victory over himself.

Arrian

The popular image [in England] of Bonaparte as a blood-stained tyrant and bandit was admittedly exaggerated, but instinct told even the most radical among the English that if liberty, equality, and justice were ever to come to their shores, it certainly was not Napoleon who would bring them there.

J. Christopher Herold

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

Thomas Carlyle

Guns are like thermometers, only instead of measuring body temperatures they measure our fear.

Jean Zimmerman

Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.I didn't realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone's parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely repsonsible for myself and thus began a few years of poverty.

Rebecca Solnit

History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

Jared Diamond

Love isn’t self-centered, even at the supreme scale.

John K. Brown

Where do you live?' is ultimately a sacred question.

Diana Butler Bass

Clothes can suggest, persuade, connote, insinuate, or indeed lie, and apply subtle pressure while their wearer is speaking frankly and straightforwardly of other matters.

Anne Hollander

Jefferson could strike up the band even when he was being lazy or fearful.

Richard Brookhiser

...the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.

Noam Chomsky

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