Quotes by Historians - Page 8

There is a patent conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our economy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum continuing growth in the search for profit.

Eric Hobsbawm

Among this people there is no leisure class. We often forget that in the United States over half the youth and adults are not in the world earning incomes, but are making homes, learning of the world, or resting after the heat of the strife. But here ninety-six per cent are toiling; no one with leisure to turn the bare and cheerless cabin into a home, no old folks to sit beside the fire and hand down traditions of the past; little of careless happy childhood and dreaming youth.

W.E.B. Du Bois

House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself.

Barbara W. Tuchman

Liberty, with all its drawbacks, is everywhere vastly more attractive to a noble soul than good social order without it — than society like a flock of sheep, or a machine working like a watch.

Johann Schiller

I wanted to leave the whole war behind me, and yet I was seeing something on that battlefield that demanded commemoration. It was unholy ground, but I wanted to thank God for showing it to me. I would never again look at a man without wondering what crimes he was capable of committing. That seemed important to know.

Robert Hicks

I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.

A.E. Samaan

She was never satisfied with anything less than perfection, but she was no grind. She was too interested in people.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Civilization is a movement and not a condition a voyage and not a harbor.

Arnold Toynbee

You have found love in your heart - and out of small changes come great things.

Alan Kinross

—and I say you still haven't answered my question, Father Bleu.""Haven't I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning

John Jakes

...capitalism is too important and complex a subject to be left to economists. Achieving a critical comprehension of it requires perspectives beyond those characteristic of modern economics. That is why this is a history not of economic ideas, but of ideas beyond the capitalist economy.

Jerry Z. Muller

The concept of maximum promotion of human rights to the expense of the majority of people in fact undermines the entire concept of the human community.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In the natural sciences, some checks exist on the prolonged acceptance of nutty ideas, which do not hold up well under experimental and observational tests and cannot readily be shown to give rise to useful working technologies. But in economics and the other social studies, nutty ideas may hang around for centuries. Today, leading presidential candidates and tens of millions of voters in the USA embrace ideas that might have been drawn from a 17th-century book on the theory and practice of mercantilism, and multitudes of politicians and ordinary people espouse notions that Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and others exploded more than two centuries ago. In these realms, nearly everyone simply believes whatever he feels good about believing.

Robert Higgs

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.

Henry Thomas Buckle

I wonder if more students would do better in elementary and high school if teachers taught more about individual exploration of subjects and less about sliding smoothly along observational ruts. Exploration is a liberal art, because it is an art that liberates, that frees, that opens away from narrowness. And it is fun.

John R. Stilgoe

In peace sons bury their fathers in war fathers bury their sons.

Herodotus

It is the greatest and the tallest of trees that the gods bring low with bolts and thunder. For the gods love to thwart whatever is greater than the rest. They do not suffer pride in anyone but themselves.

Herodotus

The feminist challenge was sweeping: it embraced education andoccupation, together with legal, political, and social status. It evendared broach the subject of equality in personal, and especiallymatrimonial, relationships. Such assertiveness was more unsettlingthan the racial threat because it was more intimate and immediate:few white men lived with blacks, but most lived with women.

Cynthia Russett

The real failure is not the one who falls down, it's the one who refuses to get up.

Habeeb Akande

For Hitschmann and Bergler, 'frigidity' had a single criterion: 'absence of the vaginal orgasm.' The standard was unqualified and absolute. A woman who did not enjoy intercourse: frigid. Women who derived sexual pleasure from acts other than intecourse were frigid too. Nothing else mattered, only whether a woman had an orgasm because a man's penis was inside her vagina. Sexually agressive women were labeled 'frigid' because of the association between masculinity and aggressiveness. Womanhood that was not passive was not properly womanly. "Frigidity," as Jane Gerhardt points out, "thus became a label and a diagnosis that defined how much sexual desire a woman must have and in what kinds of sexual behavior she must engage to be 'healthy'.

Hanne Blank

Finally, Christians were accused of being subversive, for they refused to worship the emperor and thus destroyed the very fiber of society. The apologists answered that it was true that they refused to worship the emperor or any other creature, but that in spite of this they were loyal subjects of the empire. What the emperor needs—they said—is not to be worshiped, but to be served; and those who serve him best are those who pray for him and for the empire to the only true God.

Justo L. González

The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.

Bill Copeland

Human improvement is from within outward.

James Froude

Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.

Noam Chomsky

I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

Edward Everett Hale

Women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation.

Gerda Lerner

Shiloh showed him what he could ask of his men, and indeed what he MUST ask of them.

H.W. Brands

We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "inplay," show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about.

Michel Foucault

The effectiveness of work increases according to geometrical progression if there are no interruptions.

André Maurois

Learning makes a man fit company for himself.

Thomas Fuller

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.

Alfred Whitney Griswold

An abundance of pictorial fancy, after all, furnished the simple mind quite as much matter for deviating from pure doctrine as any personal interpretation of Holy Scripture.

Johan Huizinga

Thus must the bewildered Wanderer stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim howling of wild beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men...(The Everlasting No)

Thomas Carlyle

It is common knowledge that 87% of the problems of the world are caused by cats. No cats, no problems."Hank the Cowdog

John Erickson

The whole world," he said, "is going Radical again. Fundamentally. In religion. In politics. In law. The Common Man has been trying to get his Radicalism said and done plainly and clearly for a hundred and fifty years. Now we take it on. Our movement. The new wave of attack." "And fill a ditch in our turn," said Irwell. "Maybe we're over the last ditch," said Rud. "There must be a last ditch somewhere..."All other revolutionary movements have been experiments so far, Christianity, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and more or less failures. They were experiments in liberation and they did not liberate. The old things wriggled back. But ours may be the experiment that succeeds. We may get to the Common-sense World State. Yes -- we -- in this room...Why not? It has to come somehow, somewhen... If it doesn't come pretty soon, there won't be much of humanity left to liberate.

H.G.Wells

The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.

Michel Foucault

News of the death of James V on 14 December gave even further cause for rejoicing, because his heir was a week-old girl, the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. Scotland would be subject to yet another weakening regency—it had endured six during the past 150 years—and should give no further trouble.

Alison Weir

Neither in the life of the individual nor in that of mankind is it desirable to know the future.

Jakob Burckhardt

All that children need is love, a grown-up to take responsibility for them, and a soft place to land.

Deborah Harkness

A man's rootage is more important than his leafage.

Woodrow Wilson

Look out how you use proud words.When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back.They wear long boots, hard boots; they walk off proud; they can’t hear you calling -Look out how you use proud words.

Carl Sandburg

Love your neighbor as yourself but don't take down the fence.

Carl Sandburg

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.

Jacques Barzun

In victory even the cowardly like to boast while in adverse times even the brave are discredited.

Sallust

The brief story of the supper at Emmaus carries within it a number of core principles of the Christian life as Luke understands it. First, the idea that one comes to know Christ through acts of generosity to other human beings. It is because of their kindness to a stranger that the disciples find the beloved teacher whom they had lost. Second, there is the idea that they can conjure his presence in prayer and in communal acts such as the breaking of bread - by remembering his life, death, and resurrection - even in an undistinguished house in an anonymous village. The simple acts of generosity and community in daily life are the acts that make real the living presence of Jesus.

Kate Cooper

I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.

Howard Zinn

[P]olitics is always a Kampfplatz.

Perry Anderson

JFK had a way of grabbing grandeur from mishap.

David Pietrusza

Mary Woolley wasn't only a suffragist; she was also a feminist. "Feminism is not a prejudice," she said, "It is a principle.

Jill Lepore

The world goes up and the world goes down And the sunshine follows the rain And yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown Can never come over again Sweet wife. No never come over again.

Charles Kingsley

The Golden Age was never the present Age.

Thomas Fuller

When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'

Hilaire Belloc

They still possess virtues which might cause shame to most Christians. No hospitals are needed among them, because there are neither mendicants nor paupers as long as there are any rich people among them. Their kindness, humanity, and courtesy not only make them liberal with what they have, but cause them to possess hardly anything except in common. A whole village must be without corn before any individual can be obliged to endure privation. They divide the produce of their fisheries equally with all who come

Reuben Gold Thwaites

Moral indignation is too precious an export to be wasted at home

Perry Anderson

We have to do a better job at the work of anthropology if we hope to maintain our role in the public discourse.

Christopher W. Brooks

The bottom line, as Raul Hilberg put it, was that most people thought that, even if Jews shouldn't be killed, they weren't worth saving.

Victoria J. Barnett

I will forever walk alone in a world overflowing with those that will never understand my meaning of “Learning to See” I’m always teaching myself to see beauty in all aspects of reality, yearning to learn the beauty in others, from their vision of everyday life to their deepest secrets of their dreams. As the sun rises I must smile, smile for those with the beautiful mind and soul. I’m so passionate for the visions I see, and the dreams I wish the world could be.

Michael Jones

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.

Jacques Barzun

Confidence is providence

Habeeb Akande

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