Quotes by Historians - Page 3

It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho, Let Einstein be,' restored the status quo.

John Collings Squire

The most visible and often tragic sacrifice of proletarian socialism - not to mention internationalism - on the altar of nationalism, of course, has been by the states that proclaim themselves to be, or to aspire to become, socialist.

André Gunder Frank

...it happens that "society is saved" as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an "assault upon society" and is branded as "Socialism.

Karl Marx

Men go and come, but earth abides.

George R. Stewart

Giving a woman your whole life is meaningless without giving her your whole heart as well.

Deborah Harkness

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production.

Karl Marx

The opposite of Nazi is neither Republican nor Democrat, conservative or liberal. Totalitarianism's diametric opposite of is Libertarianism.

A.E. Samaan

I am not yet come of age, my lord. How can I be queen?” asked Constance fearfully.

Laurel A. Rockefeller

They have a very low rate for attempted murder and a high rate for successfully concluded murder. It seems that when a French person sets out to kill someone, they make a good job of it.

Nick Yapp

Richard Nixon's conversation was "loaded with so many stories of all the foreign dignitaries he'd called upon in his career that he sounded like a guy who had pinioned his neighbors into watching his vacation slides.

Rick Perlstein

The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible, but against their ideas of perfection...

Rebecca Solnit

Come clean with a child heartLaugh as peaches in the summer windLet rain on a house roof be a songLet the writing on your facebe a smell of apple orchards on late June.

Carl Sandburg

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

Will Durant

Rare and powerful harmonies exist,Shaping both scent and contour in a flower.Thus brilliance lies unseen by us until,Beneath the chisel, it blazes in the diamond.And thus do images of fleeting vision,Drifting above like cloud-forms in the sky,Once turned to stone live on from age to age,Held always in a faultless, polished phrase.("A Sonnet To Form")

Valery Bryusov

Jack Miles's wonderful literary reading of the Hebrew Bible as a biography of God offers the insight that after the Book of Job, God never speaks again. God may seem to silence Job, but Job silences God. It is lovely that Job silencing God is part of the text (though likely an accidental order of the books), because it reflects a real change in the real world after the Book of Job came into it.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

If we cannot agree on what was important yesterday, what more on events that happened a hundred or three hundred years ago? The point here is that history is open ended and we cannot be sure about the past. So why study history? Because it teaches us to see the connections between events. Knowing how and why a certain event happened is helpful because in many cases people separated by time and place can sometimes be in similar situations. They can be mentally contemporaneous without knowing it. History gives us hindsight.

Ambeth R. Ocampo

[Blinker] Hall, operating on the quaint theory that the Navy might be needed for battle and that whatever increased the ship's efficiency was a criterion for change, had continued trampling on the toes of orthodoxy.

Barbara Tuchman

(Meanwhile, other people seem to be getting along with God just fine, very well indeed. Why not me?)

Lauren F. Winner

There is in every true woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.

Washington Irving

Historical revisionists find what they set out to find.

Gregg Frazer

Stop complaining and start living.

Habeeb Akande

Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear.

H.G.Wells

For it is better to drink a wholesome draught of truth from the humble vessel, than poison mixed with honey from a golden goblet.

Nennius

The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing

James Gleick

Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.

Shelby Foote

the pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is not just any trajectory of a dynamical system. It is the trajectory toward which all other trajectories converge.

James Gleick

Building a museum case and filling it with types of mussels is one way of knowing mussels; but on the shore, a mussel leads to a crab or a curious stone, which leads to another thing and eventually leads back to mussels, which is another and perhaps a more far-reaching way to know mussels. The sea that always seems like a metaphor, but one that is always moving, cannot be fixed, like a heart that is a like a tongue that is like a mystery that is like a story that is like a border that is like something altogether different and like everything at once. One thing leads to another, and this is the treasure that always runs through your fingers and never runs out.

Rebecca Solnit

Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, "When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile.

James D. Bradley

He is indeed the true enchanter, whose spell operates, not upon the senses, but upon the imagination and the heart.

Washington Irving

Our ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries. When we face a problem, we may not know its solution, but we have insight, increasing knowledge, and an inkling of what we are looking for. When we face a mystery, however, we can only stare in wonder and bewilderment, not knowing what an explanation would even look like.

Noam Chomsky

But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. 'Only philosophers should write history,' he said. 'In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.' 'History,' he concludes, 'is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead;' we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot 'history proves that anything can be proved by history.

Will Durant

The weakest and most timorous are the most revengeful and implacable.

Thomas Fuller

Workers of the world unite???? How'bout.... Staunch individualists disperse!!!

A.E. Samaan

The essence of the Revolution is to abolish the attainment of unqualified power of man over man either by vote-getting, money-pressure or crude terror. The Revolution repudiates profit or terror altogether as methods of human intercourse. It turns the attention of men and women back from a frantic and futile struggle for the means of power, a struggle against our primary social instincts, to an innate urgency to make and to a beneficial competition for preeminence in social service. It recalls man to a clean and creative life from the entanglements and perversion of secondary issues into which he has fallen. It replaces property and official authority by the compelling prestige of sound achievement. Eminent service remains the only source of influence left in the world . . .

H.G.Wells

Today the word "hero" has been diminished. confused with "celebrity." But in my father's generation the word meant something. celebrities seek fame. They take actions to get attention. Most often, the actions they take have no particular moral content. Heroes are heroes because they have risked something to help others. Their actions involve courage. Often, those heroes have been indifferent to the public's attention. But at least, the hero could understand the focus of the emotion.

James D. Bradley

He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.

Irving Howe

You cannot serve people by giving them orders as to what to do. The real servant of the people must live among them, think with them, feel for them, and die for them...The servant of the people, unlike the leader, is not on a high horse trying to carry the people to some designated point to which he would like to go for his own advantage. The servant of the people is down among them, living as they live, doing what they do and enjoying what they enjoy. He may be a little better informed than some of the other members of the group; it may be that he as had some experience they have not had, but in spite of this advantage he should have more humility than those whom he serves.

Carter G. Woodson

Some things are worse than death... If a man lives, he must still live with himself.

Timothy B. Tyson

The written word has its limits and its challenges, for the primal sound in the whole world is that made by the human voice, and the likeness of this human voice must be rendered in dots and strokes...Yet I never forget that the voice, too, is important...Don't mumble or hesitate. Speak...in a loud voice, clearly, and without fear.

Jonathan D. Spence

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

Edward Gibbon

Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

Change of weather is the discourse of fools.

Thomas Fuller

Legalize the right to choose wrong.Legalize individual liberty.

A.E. Samaan

I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality that's beyond belief.

Noam Chomsky

In the yard of the inn, Daffy Cadwaladyr introduced himself. "Short for Davyd," he said pleasantly.The Londoner looked as if she'd never heard a sillier name in her life.

Emma Donoghue

What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?

Alexis de Tocqueville

Historiography -- commonly and often simultaneously defined as the study of historians' scholarship, how history has been and is contrived, the history of historical writing, and the body of historical scholarship on historical subject matter -- is, therefore, essential to understand when studying history.

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie

Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.

Jared Diamond

she and Ben chattered away to each other in the language of mothers with their toddlers; the two understood every word exchanged, while the rest of the world just listened, smiled, and didn’t understand a single word of the happy gibberish.

William R. Forstchen

Democratic Socialism devolves into totalitarian Socialism and eventually into full on Communism as people resist statism.

A.E. Samaan

All I know is I'm not a Marxist.

Karl Marx

Many call this process 'the destruction of nature.' But it's not really destruction, it's change. Nature cannot be destroyed.

Yuval Noah Harari

Hope is not a door, but a sense that there might be a door at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment even before that way is found or followed.

Rebecca Solnit

Yet despite...accommodations with commerce, Möser regarded the market as primarily a threat--to the artisanal citizens of the town, to the traditional wants of the peasantry, and to the political structure to society, since it created a growing class of people outside the traditional paternalistic relations of the countryside. Möser's conception of contemporary political and economic trends in Osnabrück was essentialy tragic and tinged with that idealization of the past that would later be called romantic. Möser's heroes were the artisan-citizen and the independent peasant, his villains the shopkeeper and the peddler.

Jerry Z. Muller

Ordinary British soldiers harbored several strange preconceptions of their own. Some were surprised that the colonists wore clothes, thinking they would dress like Indians. Other had expected to encounter roving bands of wild animals in the manner of African jungles. And when a loyalist came aboard one ship to help it into port, the British crew and troops were dumbfounded. "All the People had been of the Opinion," they exclaimed, "that the inhabitants of America were black.

Joseph J. Ellis

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us from... human souls we never saw... And yet these arouse us terrify us teach us comfort us open their hearts to us as brothers.

Charles Kingsley

I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.

Rebecca Solnit

Indigenous foods die when no one learns to cook them.

Jean Zimmerman

It is symptomatic of the constricting specialism and the oppressive burden of fact of our time that it has been left to the imagination of a novelist, Marguerite Yourcenar, to create the broadest, the most balanced and in many ways the most authentic interpretation of the affair.

Royston Lambert

I’ll admit that my garden now grows hope in lavish profusion, leaving little room for anything else. I suppose it has squeezed out more practical plants like caution and common sense. Still, though, hope does not flourish in every garden, and I feel thankful it has taken root in mine.

Sharon Kay Penman

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