Quotes by Historians - Page 19

Don't let your will roar when your power only whispers.

Thomas Fuller

It was the word 'late' that did it. Such a stupid word to use of the dead, implying that they would be with us today if they hadn't happened to be delayed in traffic somewhere...

Emma Donoghue

The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but sacred, the ganz andere or 'wholly other.

Mircea Eliade

... a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane.

Rebecca Solnit

Our side has agents. Their side has spies.

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

In the final analysis, what is it that we call popular, democratic power? Beyond the expressed will of the people, as it is supposedly formulated, there is no appeal; here we meet the absolute, the universal, the indivisible, and the immovable. There is nothing a priori, nothing anterior to democratic power; no ideas of truth, no notions of good or bad, can bind the Popular Will. This 'will' is free in the sense that it stands above all notions of value. It is egalitarian because it is reared on arithmetic equality..It is not open to any appeal, it listens to no demand for grace, no plea for compassion. Like the Sphinx, the Popular Will is immovable in its enigmatic silence.

Tage Lindbom

In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail

James Gleick

African American women actively contested white constructions of black female labor.

LeShawn Harris

Nothing can stop an enemy from picking wireless messages out of the free air - and nothing did.

Barbara Tuchman

Adams was in a hurry and ordered his horse drawn carriage to wait for him in front of his house. The horses were spooked before he got in the carriage, and the carriage was destroyed in an accident. Pondering what could have happened to him , Adams retreated to Psalm 20's injunctions against trusting in chariots and horses.

Paul C. Nagel

Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term.

Carl R. Trueman

The affair made men feel larger than life.

Barbara W. Tuchman

One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so 'easy' as they had been.

Peter Watson

In these circumstances they did what most of us do, and, being ignorant of the truth, persuaded themselves into believing what they wished to believe.

Arrian

Against the claims of a violent "human nature" there is enormous historical evidence that people, when free of a manufactured nationalist or religious hysteria, are more inclined to be compassionate than cruel. When citizens have an opportunity to learn of vicious acts committed by their own governments, they react with indignation and protest.So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.

Howard Zinn

In politics, if you're explaining, you're loosing.

Rick Perlstein

There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.

Stephen E. Ambrose

Doctors of ancient times used to recommend reading to their patients as a physical exercise on an equal level as walking, running, or ball-playing.

Jean Leclercq

There has been so much action in the past,” said D.H. Lawrence, “especially sexual action, a wearying repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself.

Michel Foucault

What Saint has ever won his crown without first contending for it?

Jerome

Fear no one except the One.

Habeeb Akande

The finger of the atheists' own divinity, Reason, wrote on the wall the appalling judgments that there is no God; that the universe is only matter in spontaneous motion; and, most grievous word of all, that what men call their souls die with the death of the body, as music dies when the strings are broken.

John Lothrop Motley

Especially appealing to the planter elite was the conservatism of the American Revolution. Indeed, according to their reading, it had been so conservative that it hardly deserved the title of revolution at all. The goal had been simple political independence, and the issue of home rule had not expanded to include the dangerous question of who should rule at home. The men who made the revolution had maintained control in victory.

James L. Roark

Liberty will never yield equality. Freewill produces a mess that you either accept or reject in favor of slavery.

A.E. Samaan

We have rule of lawyers, not rule of law. The legal profession has a monopoly over one branch of government as it was never intended to. The American Bar Association owns an entire branch of our government. We should not be surprised that we are the most litigious society in the world. It is big business with a stranglehold on one of the three branches of government.

A.E. Samaan

In reality, the laborer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic bondage is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change of masters, and by the oscillation in the market price of labor power. Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-laborer.

Karl Marx

In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.

Alexis de Tocqueville

His targets had little in common, other than that they had somehow aroused his enmity.

Harold Holzer

There's something immoral about abandoning your common sense in matters of social importance.

A.E. Samaan

Vaccination was, and is, thoroughly infused with our politics, our social values, and our cultural norms. By acknowledging and understanding the divergent reasons why we've vaccinated in the past, however, we just may ensure the continued success of vaccination in the future.

Elena Conis

The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.

Mircea Eliade

Legislating morality grows big government immensely, and helps fashion the noose the government will use to ultimately hang you by.

A.E. Samaan

but now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.

Will Durant

Socialism is "group-think." How uninformed in history do you have to be to advocate for "group-think"??

A.E. Samaan

John Hay calls the telegraph reporter, "the natural enemy of the scribe.

Harold Holzer

Poets and painters are outside the class system or rather they constitute a special class of their own like the circus people and the gypsies.

Gerald Brenan

Every totalitarian Communist considered themselves as a Socialist first and foremost.

A.E. Samaan

Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.

A.B. Guthrie Jr.

When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

David McCullough

Many people believe that gender identity...is rooted in biology...Many other people understand that gender is more like language than like biology; that is, while they understand us humans to have a biological capacity to use language, they point out we are not born with a hard-wired language "preinstalled" in our brains. Likewise, while we have a biological capacity to identify with and learn to "speak" from a particular location in a cultural gender system, we don't come into the world with a predetermined gender identity.

Susan Stryker

All wars are popular for the first 30 days.

Arthur Schlesinger

it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.

James Gleick

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

Karl Marx

What I have sought is to understand what has been said.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Unless the relationship of law to Christianity is re-established, there is no future except destruction for Western culture.

R. J. Rushdooney

It was not only that he was a great man, but, oh, there was such fun in being led by him.

Edward J. Renehan Jr.

We need a new ethic of place, one that has room for salmon and skyscrapers, suburbs and wilderness, Mount Rainier and the Space Needle, one grounded in history.

Matthew Klingle

A minister's (cabinet member's) function was not to DO the work but to see that it got done.

Barbara W. Tuchman

To save all we must risk all.

Friedrich Schiller

Step out of my sunlight.

Diogenes Laërtius

The development of the telescope marks, indeed, a new phase in human thought, a new vision of life. It is an extraordinary thing that the Greeks, with their lively and penetrating minds, never realized the possibilities of either microscope or telescope. They made no use of the lens. Yet they lived in a world in which glass had been known and had been made beautiful for hundreds of years; they had about them glass flasks and bottles, through which they must have caught glimpses of things distorted and enlarged. But science in Greece was pursued by philosophers in an aristocratic spirit, men who, with a few such exceptions as the ingenious Archimedes and Hiero, were too proud to learn from such mere artisans as jewellers and metal- and glass-workers.Ignorance is the first penalty of pride. The philosopher had no mechanical skill and the artisan had no philosophical education, and it was left for another age, more than a thousand years later, to bring together glass and the astronomer.(The Earth in Space and Time §1)

H.G.Wells

There is no shame in not knowing your history, the shame lies in not finding out.

Habeeb Akande

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

Niall Ferguson

This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world, seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated.

H.G.Wells

The rule of the people has the fairest name of all, equality (isonomia), and does none of the things that a monarch does. The lot determines offices, power is held accountable, and deliberation is conducted in public.

Herodotus

What in the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to its senses?

W.E.B. Du Bois

Facts do not become historical evidence until someone thinks up something for them to prove or disprove.

Cary Carson

I can bear to hear of imputed or real errors. The man who wishes to stand well in the opinion of others must do this, because he is thereby enabled to correct his faults or remove the prejudices which are imbibed against him.

Ron Chernow

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read.", NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)

David McCullough

There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.

Thomas Carlyle

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