Quotes by Historians - Page 4

For all the books in his possession, he still failed to read the stories written plain as day in the faces of the people around him.

Emma Donoghue

Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

Christopher Hill

Go ahead, and fear not. You will have a full library at your service.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

The foremost, or indeed the sole condition, which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

Alexis de Tocqueville

either on a competitive or a cartel basis.

George W. Stocking

Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Superficial and emotional subject might sway undecided voters.

Harold Holzer

Education becomes most rich and alive when it confronts the reality of moral conflict in the world.

Howard Zinn

By buying the power of the workman, the capitalist has, therefore, acquired the right to use of make that labouring power during the whole day or week.

Karl Marx

One of the worst things about burying a child is the stress of wondering.

Leslie A. Gordon

...it is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose. -Wilbur Wright, 1911

David McCullough

The sensayer frowned. “You’re saying you discuss theology while having sex.”“For beginners it’s before and after mostly, managing it during sex takes skill and concentration.

Ada Palmer

Constantinople had been changing for sometime before the Young Turks got hold of it. It would continue to change long after they had gone.

Charles Emmerson

It is often said that Islam is an egalitarian religion. There is much truth in this assertion. If we compare Islam at the time of its advent with the societies that surrounded it—the stratified feudalism of Iran and the caste system of India to the east, the privileged aristocracies of both Byzantine and Latin Europe to the west—the Islamic dispensation does indeed bring a message of equality. Not only does Islam not endorse such systems of social differentiation; it explicitly and resolutely rejects them. The actions and utterances of the Prophet, the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by tradition, are overwhelmingly against privilege by descent, by birth, by status, by wealth, or even by race, and insist that rank and honor are determined only by piety and merit in Islam.

Bernard Lewis

After all, when ‘the Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become’ He resolved to ‘wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created – and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground – for I regret that I have made them’ (Genesis 6:7). The Bible thinks it is perfectly all right to destroy all animals as punishment for the crimes of Homo sapiens, as if the existence of giraffes, pelicans and ladybirds has lost all purpose if humans misbehave. The Bible could not imagine a scenario in which God repents having created Homo sapiens, wipes this sinful ape off the face of the earth, and then spends eternity enjoying the antics of ostriches, kangaroos and panda bears.

Yuval Noah Harari

Most people, if they know they have done wrong, foolishly suppose they can conceal their error by defending it, and finding a justification for it; but in my belief there is only one medicine for an evil deed, and that is for the guilty man to admit his guilt and show that he is sorry for it. Such an admission will make the consequences easier for the victim to bear, and the guilty man himself, by plainly showing his distress at former transgressions, will find good grounds of hope for avoiding similar transgressions in the future.

Arrian

In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don't have jobs, so I don't know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything. I guess the time gets spread very thing like butter over all the world, the roads and houses and playgrounds and stores, so there's only a little smear of time on each place, then everyone has to hurry on to the next bit.

Emma Donoghue

No small part of the club's audience consisted of would-be comics, as well as the leading comics of the day. In fact, there were so many gagsters around that it was difficult to know who was part of the act and who was just sitting in.

Kliph Nesteroff

Rather, when famine, plague or war break out of our control, we feel that somebody must have screwed up, we set up a commission of inquiry, and promise ourselves that next time we’ll do better.

Yuval Noah Harari

It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.

Arnold Joseph Toynbee

We live in fortunate times in which we have only the irritant of terrorism instead of world wars to worry about

Edward N. Luttwak

Lincoln admitted his infirmities to make way for his spring.

Richard Brookhiser

Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon

Rick Perlstein

If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those who feel compassion for all beings must be boundless. They are not separate, not alone, not lonely, not vulnerable in the same way as those of us stranded in the islands of ourselves, but they are vulnerable in other ways. Still, that sense of the dangers of feeling for others is so compelling that many withdraw, and develop elaborate stories to justify withdrawal, and then forget that they have shrunk. Most of us do, one way or another.

Rebecca Solnit

With the spread of conformity and image-driven superficiality, the allure of an individuated woman in full possession of herself and her powers will prove irresistible. We were born for plenitude and inner fulfillment.

Elizabeth Prioleau

My mind may be sober, but my confidence is high!

Habeeb Akande

My environment reflects the life I've led, the places I've visited and the people I've loved.

Virginia Nicholson

The future is not in the hands of fate, but in ours.

Dennis L. Bark

I love being able to see an un-written future.

Michael Jones

What is Life?(1) Tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.(2) Dictionary definition in biology (chemical process within organic entities involving metabolism etc.)(3) Mrs Woolf: ‘Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’(4) Series of actual and hypothetical behavioural data which differ in certain assignable ways from data defining dead or inanimate entities.(5) That which the Lord infused into Adam. See Genesis 1. 4 [sc. 2. 7].Which?Mental Cramp.

Isaiah Berlin

In Russia everything is a secret, but there is no secrecy.

Robert K. Massie

Véra assumed her married name almost as a stage name; rarely has matrimony so much represented a profession. It was one of the ironies of the life that – born at a time and place where women could and did lay claim to all kinds of ambitions – she should elevate the role of wife to a high art. […] Traditionally, a man changes his name and braces himself for fame; a woman changes hers and passes into oblivion. This was not to be Véra’s case, although she did gather her married name around her like a cloak, which she occasionally opened to startling effect. She would never be forced to make a woman’s historic choice between love and work. Nor would Verochka, as Vladimir called her, squander any of her professional training, though as it happened her husband would be the direct (and sole) beneficiary of that expertise.

Stacy Schiff

How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.

David Hume

Look beyond yourself.

Michael J. Jackson

The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection and will in turn be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.

Washington Irving

Ex-slaves, in large part, shared a different economic vision. They were "always on the move," searching for family, denying their labor to "dishonest or oppressive employers," and asserting their independence through their mobility. Rather than staying in place, working as much as possible for a high a wage as possible, and thus possibly accumulating a greater array of material good, a large number of freedpeople sought not to maximize income but to minimize the amount of "time spent at work on other people's behalf.

Elsa Barkley Brown

When suicide is out of fashion we conclude that none but madmen destroy themselves; and all the efforts of courage appear chimerical to dastardly minds ... Nevertheless, how many instances are there, well attested, of men, in every other respect perfectly discreet, who, without remorse, rage, or despair, have quitted life for no other reason than because it was a burden to them, and have died with more composure than they lived?

David Hume

To face a man in combat is challenge enough. To find the goddess in a woman is the life work of a man. Hard though the first may be, the second is the harder longer road. But every man seeks the woman of the dream, and only the best of men finds what he seeks.

Rosalind Miles

Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.

Carl Lotus Becker

A dream business that doesn't make money is a living nightmare.

Habeeb Akande

Most the power of authoritarianism is freely given.

Timothy Snyder

The "norm" for humanity is love.Brutality is an aberration.We are not sinners by nature.We learn to be bad.We are taught to stray from our good paths.We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy.

Jack D. Forbes

The more people have time to experience the joys of creativity, the less they will be consumers, especially of mass-produced culture. I see that as a kind of new wealth that counts for more than owning material things. I also see art as something people will do rather than consume, and do it as a natural part of their lives; creative endeavors are a form of profound spiritual satisfaction.

Theodore Roszak

We are what we read -- and the power of books to transform the minds and personalities of their readers can give cause for anxiety as well as for celebration.

Richard Kieckhefer

If I considered the Partition an archeological site, and the many experiences of those who witnessed it as the site’s structural sedimentation, then the deeper I excavated, the more I found, and that too in innumerable renditions.

Aanchal Malhotra

Oh! Let us never never doubt What nobody is sure about.

Hilaire Belloc

That’s how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously.

Yuval Noah Harari

He also said that he marvelled that among the Greeks, those who were skilful in a thing contend together; but those who have no such skill act as judges of the contest.

Diogenes Laërtius

As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power.

Rebecca Solnit

No one says: I broke rules, I broke rules, I broke rules - I broke all the rules. That one. And that one. And that one too. Yes, I did.

Joanna Brooks

The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.

Marc Bloch

Sometimes you must shed your skin to save it.

Emma Donoghue

Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

Thomas Carlyle

The change, I think, that conversion gradually effects on your heart is this: you come, over some stretched-out time, to want to do the things that God wants you to do, because you want to be close to Him.

Lauren F. Winner

It is more important to me that my students come out of my class believing 'This story is interesting and I might want to know more about it', than to fill them up with information. If I can remind them or convince them that history is interesting then I feel I have succeeded, because unlike chemistry or physics, history is a subject that anyone can teach themselves, if they are interested."[

H.W. Brands

I abhor the idea of a perfect world. It would bore me to tears.

Shelby Foote

Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

Rebecca Solnit

Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, "paid", whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have "mortgaged the future"; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy.

Richard Davenport-Hines

Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever Do noble things not dream them all day long And so make life death and that vast forever One grand sweet song.

Charles Kingsley

In fighting its war, the Ministry of the Interior has resorted to a novel tactic–marriage. No Saudi official will admit on the record that the Kingdom’s terrorist problem might boil down to sexual frustration, but if a social system bans hot-blooded young men from contact with the opposite sex in their most hot-blooded years, perhaps it is hardly surprising that some of them channel this frustration into violence. One cornerstone of the extremist rehab program is to get the “beneficiaries,” as they are called, settled down with a wife as soon as possible. The Ministry of the Interior pays each unmarried beneficiary 60,000 riyals (some $18,000), the going rate for a dowry, or bride price. The family arranges a marriage, and whenever he can, Prince Mohammed turns up for the wedding.When Khaled Al-Hubayshi was released from Al-Haier prison early in 2007, he wasted no time finding himself a bride at government expense.

Robert Lacey

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