Quotes by Historians - Page 6

We have the right to demand that if we find men against whom there is not only suspicion, but almost a certainty that they have had collusion with men whose interests were in conflict with the interests of the public, they shall, at least, be required to bring positive facts with which to prove there has not been such collusion; and they ought themselves to have been the first to demand such an investigation." -Teddy Roosevelt

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Theater owners dodged construction costs, cutting corners and employing nonunion labor. Shoddy methods caused the death of vaudeville comedian Rube Dickinson in Kansas City. Booked at a brand-new venue, Dickinson stepped outside to have a smoke and was standing underneath the large wooden marquee advertising him when it collapsed. As the marquee caved, so too did his head—killed under the weight of his own name.

Kliph Nesteroff

Court life for a queen of France at that time was, however, stultifyingly routine. Eleanor found that she was expected to be no more than a decorative asset to her husband, the mother of his heirs and the arbiter of good taste and modesty.

Alison Weir

Darwinism by itself did not produce the Holocaust, but without Darwinism... neither Hitler nor his Nazi followers would have had the necessary scientific underpinnings to convince themselves and their collaborators that one of the worlds greatest atrocities was really morally praiseworthy.

Richard Weikart

I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.

Niall Ferguson

There was, however, a difference between his mood and that of the rest of the cabinet. They felt desperate; he felt challenged.

William Manchester

Light God's eldest daughter is a principal beauty in a building.

Thomas Fuller

Unjust social orders do no fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor, though such appeals may be an important element; history teaches us that they fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down. Rarely do such revolutions emerge in a neat and morally pristine process.

Timothy B. Tyson

Keep striving, for God gives His hardest battles to His strongest soldiers.

Habeeb Akande

Events of great consequence often spring from trifling circumstances.

Livy

[T]hat mutual jealousy, that intolerantly keen edge of criticism, that irrational hunger for a beautiful perfection, that life and wisdom do presently and most mercifully dull.

H.G.Wells

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

Thomas Fuller

We are but phantoms, and the phantoms of phantoms, desires like cloud-shadows and wills of straw that eddy in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train carries the shadow of its lights - so be it! But one thing is real and certain, one thing is no dream-stuff, but eternal and enduring. It is the centre of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or altogether vain. I loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are dead together!

H.G.Wells

Hundreds would die, but not the thing they died for.

Esther Forbes

In insisting that peasant activity contrary to Communist policies could be defined as kulak while at the same time maintaining that his approach to the peasantry was based on scientific Marxist class analysis, Lenin provided his successors with conceptualizations that would be used in collectivization when Stalin launched a war against all peasants.

Lynne Viola

This is what I feared would come; this is what I have dreaded. It is not very bright and honorable as you have always thought it; it is not like a ballad. It is a muddle and a mess, and a sinful waste, and good men have died and more will follow.

Philippa Gregory

Like almost all girls I don't know the date of my birth: my parents did not trouble to record the day and the time. I only know the year and the season, and I only know the season because my mother had a great desire for asparagus when she was carrying me and swears that she ate it too green and her bellyache brought on my birth.

Philippa Gregory

In fair weather prepare for foul.

Thomas Fuller

… What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary -property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life -don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The fate of warnings in political affairs is to be futile when the recipient wishes otherwise.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Deploring change is the unchangeable habit of all Englishmen. If you find any important figures who really like change such as Bernard Shaw Keir Hardie Lloyd George Selfridge or Disraeli you will find that they are not really English at all but Irish Scotch Welsh American or Jewish. Englishmen make changes sometimes great changes. But secretly or openly they always deplore them.

Raymond Postgate

He understood the code of his social class enough to affect an air of indifference about life.

H.W. Brands

TR on using extramarital accusations against Wilson: "It won't work. You can't cast a man as Romeo who looks and acts like an apothecary's clerk.

David Pietrusza

Lincoln said his spiky hair had "a way of getting up in the world".

Harold Holzer

It does not require much historical knowledge (though it may require a certain historical perspective) to see that many, if not all, of the "aristocratic" elements of the Constitution (as in other countries) have gradually disappeared or were washed away during the past two hundred years, while the monarchic powers of the presidency and the democratic extent of majority rule became more and more overwhelming.

John Lukacs

live life like its going out of style

Andrew Robert Burn

You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.

Woodrow Wilson

Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.

W.E.B. Du Bois

Observe the eyes, for they are the windows to her soul.

Habeeb Akande

Where error is irreparable, repentance is useless.

Edward Gibbon

Peace is preferable to war. But it’s not an absolute value, and so we always ask, “What kind of peace?

Noam Chomsky

Giraldus claimed that he had heard about Eleanor's adultery with Geoffrey from the saintly Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, who had learned of it from Henry II of England, Geoffrey's son and Eleanor's second husband. Eleanor was estranged from Henry at the time Giraldus was writing, and the king was trying to secure an annulment of their marriage from the Pope. It would have been to his advantage to declare her an adulterous wife who had had carnal relations with his father, for that in itself would have rendered their marriage incestuous and would have provided prima facie grounds for its dissolution.

Alison Weir

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

Washington Irving

I believe in Democracy because it releases the energies of every human being.

Woodrow Wilson

He was always acting, always enveloping himself in artificiality, perhaps to conceal the volcano within.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Mythology was never designed to describe historically verifiable events that actually happened. It was an attempt to express their inner significance or to draw attention to realities that were too elusive to be discussed in a logically coherent way.

Karen Armstrong

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Thomas Fuller

The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.

Hilaire Belloc

The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.

Charles Kingsley

A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.

Rick Perlstein

If your desires be endless your cares and fears will be so too.

Thomas Fuller

He did something he rarely did. He decided not to see things from the other guy's point of view.

H.W. Brands

I think you can be an enemy of Saddam Hussein even if Donald Rumsfeld is also an enemy of Saddam Hussein.

Adam Michnik

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

Wallace Stegner

I’m less interested in proselytizing or a bigger tent for its own sake than in issues of human flourishing. What are the best conditions in which people live and flourish? It’s more the, How do we get along? What does it mean for living now?

Karen L. King

Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories ofconstrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of humannature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let’s call this theRealistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained inall respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold aRealistic Vision of human nature.

Michael Shermer

I handed him a beaker and toyed with the pleats of my skirt. The folds kept rippling against my knees in a distracting way. It was one of Naomi's additions to my wardrobe. I quickly decided that I hated it.

Andrea Cremer

That image of a chessboard — an epic contest between two giant players, carefully nudging their pieces around the globe as part of a grand strategy — has indeed become a familiar metaphor for the Cold War. But it is misleading. Many decisions remembered today for their farsighted, tactical brilliance were denounced in their day as weak-willed. And big, public gestures often made less difference than the small, hidden ones.

Sam Tanenhaus

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.

Rebecca Solnit

The Persians are very fond of wine ... It is also their general practice to deliberate upon affairs of weight when they are drunk and then in the morning when they are sober the decision to which they came the night before is put before them by the master of the house in which it was made and if it is then approved they act on it if not they set it aside. Sometimes however they are sober at their first deliberations but in this case they always reconsider the matter under the influence of wine.

Herodotus

Like the New Orleans tradition that preceded it, and the Swing Era offerings that followed it, Chicago jazz was not just the music of a time and place, but also a timeless style of performance - and for its exponents, very much a way of life - one that continues to reverberate to this day in the works of countless Dixieland and traditional jazz bands around the world. For many listeners, the Chicago style remains nothing less than the quintessential sound of jazz.

Ted Gioia

Politics was at once clinical and human, driven by principles and passions that he (the leader) had to master and harness for the good of the whole.

Jon Meacham

The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.

Bede

One should never direct people towards happiness, becausehappiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should directthem towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its preycan be happy too, but only human beings can feel affectionfor each other, and this is the highest achievement they canaspire to.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.

John Lewis Gaddis

The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse. – Calvin Coolidge

David Pietrusza

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

Stacy Schiff

The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books 'any old time they have a mind to,' libraries will remain the nurseries of heresy and independence of thought. They will, in fact, preserve that freedom which is a far more important part of our lives than any ideology or orthodoxy, the freedom that dissolves orthodoxies and inspires solutions to the ever-changing challenges of the future. I hope that your library and mine will continue in this way to be dangerous for many years to come.

Edmund S. Morgan

It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.

Thomas Carlyle

[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it.

Wallace Stegner

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