Quotes by Historians - Page 7

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

Wallace Stegner

Many guilty consciences have been created by the slave trade. Europeans know that they carried on the slave trade, and Africans are aware that the trade would have been impossible if certain Africans did not cooperate with slave ships. To ease their guilty consciences, Europeans try to throw the major responsibility for the slave trade on to the Africans. One major author on the slave trade (appropriately titled Sins of Our Fathers) explained how many white people urged him to state that the trade was the responsibility of African chiefs, and that Europeans merely turned up to buy captives- as though without European demand there would have been captives sitting on the beach by the millions! Issues such as those are not the principal concern of this study, but they can be correctly approached only after understanding that Europe became the center of a world-wide system and that it was European capitalism which set slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in motion. Pg. 82

Walter Rodney

What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young.

H.G.Wells

For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.

Jared Diamond

Notwithstanding the memories of slavery, and in the face poverty, ignorance, terrorism, and subjugation still deeply woven into their lives, the embittered past of blacks was taken onto a much higher plane of intellectual and artistic consideration during the Renaissance.

Clement Alexander Price

To be a writer - write! To be an author - publish! To be a bestselling author - never stop writing!

David Maxwell

Man is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence she acts for him. But the very fact that constitutes him a man is that he does not remain stationary, where nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical necessity into a moral law.

Friedrich Schiller

Evan ran his finger across the faded leather spines. He laughed at how silly some of the names were: Paint Your Roses Red, Edelweiss and Me, World of Mushrooms and Fungi, The Toadstool Diaries, Daffodils Unseen and Exotic Plants Unleashed, to name but a few.

H.B. Bolton

Alcoholism is above all a disease of denial.

David Stafford

(Theodore) Roosevelt confessed early fascination with "girls'stories" such as Little Man and Little Women and An Old-Fashioned Girl.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

The positive emotions that arise in...unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevent these goals from being achieved.

Rebecca Solnit

They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretenses, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.

Tacitus

On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter.

Hendrik Willem van Loon

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

H.G.Wells

There is a very dangerous myth that #Hitler was solely fueled by racism. His desire to engineer society was pervasive. Racism alone cannot explain what happened in The Holocaust without also addressing Hitler's statist policies.

A.E. Samaan

While Newton seemed to draw off the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy, so agreeable to the natural vanity and curiosity of men; and thereby restored her ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.

David Hume

To lovers of adventure and novelty, Africa displays a most ample field.

James Rennell

Every man knows that he will die: and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of a sane being.

John Myers Myers

In the field of Egyptian mathematics Professor Karpinski of the University of Michigan has long insisted that surviving mathematical papyri clearly demonstrate the Egyptians' scientific interest in pure mathematics for its own sake. I have now no doubt that Professor Karpinski is right, for the evidence of interest in pure science, as such, is perfectly conclusive in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus.

James Henry Breasted

everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure

Alexis de Tocqueville

After rain comes fair weather.

James Howell

I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.

Noam Chomsky

Since we never get everything we want or need from our families, we look for sufficiency in surrogates.

Richard Brookhiser

marinate your mind

David McCullough

We know how the people of Argentina ruined their country. We know how the people of Venezuela ruined their country. Few Americans know much about the history of Argentina or Venezuela. But if they wish to know how the people of the USA are ruining their own country, all they have to do is look around themselves, including, in most cases, looking in the mirror.

Robert Higgs

When he [Malevranche] happened to find Descartes' book entitled Man in a book shop on the rue Saint Jaques, he leafed through it, bought it and "read it with so much pleasure that he was forced at times to interrupt his reading, so loud were the beatings of his heart due to the extreme pleasure he had in doing so". Those who never put down a book of erudition, science or philosophy, to catch their breath, so to speak, and recover from the strong emotion they experience, certainly ignore of of the most exquisite pleasures of intellectual life.

Étienne Gilson

All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless. But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

Lewis Mumford

How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping?

Woodrow Wilson

We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor.

David Brion Davis

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.

Rebecca Solnit

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

Thomas Carlyle

You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

Rebecca Solnit

We are not going to reduce energy capture unless catastrophe forces us to—which means that the only way to avoid running out of resources, poisoning the planet, or both, will be by tapping into renewable, clean power.

Ian Morris

What troubled people especially was not just the tragedy--or even the needlessness--but the element of fate in it all. If the Titanic had heeded any of the six ice messages on Sunday . . . if ice conditions had been normal . . . if the night had been rough or moonlit . . . if she had seen the berg 15 second sooner--or 15 seconds later . . . if she had hit the ice any other way . . . if her watertight bulkheads had been one deck higher . . . if she had carried enough boats . . . if the Californian had only come. Had any one of these "ifs" turned out right, every life might have been save. But they all went against her--a classic Greek tragedy.

Walter Lord

A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad.

Gregory of Tours

Patriarchy has been the normal in almost all agricultural and industrial societies. ...If patriarchy in Afro-Asia resulted from some chance occurrence, why were the Aztecs and Incas patriarchal? It is far more likely that even though the precise definition of man and woman varies between cultures, there is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is; there are plenty of theories, none of the convincing.

Yuval Noah Harari

Humanity's moral conscience progresses, slowly yet surely...

Cheikh Anta Diop

Birds are sensitive to mispronunciation, even more sensitive than the French.

Alan Powers

An eminent American is reported to have said to friends who wished to put him forward 'Gentlemen let there be no mistake. I should make a good president but a very bad candidate.'

James Bryce

Dirac's equation not only accounted for the spin of the electron and its observed magnetic moment, but also correctly explained the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. If the derivation of the Sommerfeld-like formula for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was one of the striking successes of the Dirac equation, some of its other features were very troublesome.

Silvan S. Schweber

The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.

Russell Kirk

What does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy?

Rick Perlstein

There are times when we stop, we sit still. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.

James Carroll

History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.

Carter G. Woodson

When they see us dance. When they see how you look at me. When they see how I smile at you.

Philippa Gregory

Heroes deal out vengeance, wiping out insults, and in an existential sense denying their own death. In twentieth-century camps, however, Todorov found, some people instead found transcendence by displaying kindness toward other people. Through small, everyday acts that committed them to the survival of other human beings--even at the cost of lowering their own chances--they demonstrated their own commitment to an abstract yet personal value. Although heroic acts were as suicidal in twentieth-century death camps as they were in nineteenth-century slave labor camps, even in hell there was still room to be a moral human being.

Edward E. Baptist

To be a cocksucker is to be oriented towards a specific gender.

Rictor Norton

I study theology in the works of creation and find in it new reasons for adoring the creator.

Jan Potocki

Dr. Rex Curry, the professor and attorney from Florida, has debated and largely proven the unavoidable evidence that Hitler's National Socialism was significantly influenced by Bellamy's 'nationalistic' form of 'socialism.' Curry is famous for making the claim that Hitler adopted the 'stiff-arm salute' from Francis and Edward Bellamy.

A.E. Samaan

Love is never lost. If not reciprocated it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.

Washington Irving

The difference between one man and another is not mere ability . . . it is energy.

Thomas Arnold

Danger past, God is forgotten.

Thomas Fuller

As the pace of the campaign quickened, politics began to clash with Kennedy's innate sense of responsibility. – Arthur Schlesinger

David Pietrusza

Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.

Woodrow Wilson

I will now sing another song for your pleasure. Now, if you like Phil Collins...you should be shot in the head.

Robert Clark

Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.

Christopher Henry Dawson

The past is never completely lost khowever extensive the devastation. Your sorrows are the bricks and mortar of a magnificent temple. What you are today and what you will be tomorrow are because of what you have been.

Gordon Wright

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