Quotes by Historians - Page 9

Sadly enough, individual liberty remains the ideal of revolutionary thinkers even in the 21st Century.

A.E. Samaan

John Quincy Adams, denying his sons permission to come home for college holidays for under-performance: "I would feel nothing but sorrow and shame at your presence.

Paul C. Nagel

Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility.

Andrew J. Bacevich

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

Will Durant

Of Teddy Roosevelt and his siblings, the author writes they were, "armed with an innate curiosity and discipline fostered by his remarkable father.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Folly is a child of power.

Barbara W. Tuchman

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

Woodrow Wilson

There is no giving advice to a young man so much in love.

Cecil Woodham-Smith

The political nature of man made it highly unlikely that a society designed to meet regularly would remain peaceable. "The way to make friends quarrel is to pit them in disputation under the public eye," Jefferson said.

Jon Meacham

Both political parties have moved to the right during the neoliberal period. Today’s New Democrats are pretty much what used to be called “moderate Republicans.” The “political revolution” that Bernie Sanders called for, rightly, would not have greatly surprised Dwight Eisenhower.The fate of the minimum wage illustrates what has been happening. Through the periods of high and egalitarian growth in the ‘50s and ‘60s, the minimum wage—which sets a floor for other wages—tracked productivity. That ended with the onset of neoliberal doctrine. Since then, the minimum wage has stagnated (in real value). Had it continued as before, it would probably be close to $20 per hour. Today, it is considered a political revolution to raise it to $15.

Noam Chomsky

Experiment and reason, tempered by intuition, were to him preferable to solid plodding in the well-trodden paths of experience.

Richard Davenport-Hines

Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.

Michael Ignatieff

Buruma is wise to recommend a balance of concessions and coordination in order to avoid war.

Renate Bridenthal

The great danger of law in modern student affairs practice is apathy, acceptance, and blind disobedience.

Peter Lake

Daffy bent down suddenly, and picked a small startled white flower. "Anemone," he said, handing it over; he made her repeat the word until she had it right. "Find me a silk to match that.

Emma Donoghue

Gratitude leads to a good attitude

Habeeb Akande

Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.

Robert Zaretsky

And she wanted to be free. It wasn't Mr. Brumley she wanted; he was but a means — if indeed he was a means — to an end. The person she wanted, the person she had always wanted — was herself. Could Mr. Brumley give her that? Would Mr. Brumley give her that? Was it conceivable he would carry sacrifice to such a pitch as that?...

H.G.Wells

But I am beginning to understand about the dignity and the art of wigs and the makeup. This small, everyday attentiveness of eyebrow pencils is perhaps a picture of the very sort of bodily care our embodied God would have us cultivate, weather in illness or wellness, whether our bodies are in the throes of ecstasy or the throes of pain.

Lauren F. Winner

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.

Rebecca Solnit

It's madness the sheep to talk peace with the wolf

Thomas Fuller

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Sometimes, the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardized tests because they do not have standardized minds.

Diane Ravitch

Most economic histories of the "world" not only omit most extra-European production and exchange (even most of that outside West Europe or even northwest Europe); they neglect the participation of the productive and exchange activities of extra-European countries in the European, not to say world, process of accumulation and development. Moreover, they disregard the part that these productive and exchange relations played in the developing world system.

André Gunder Frank

Successful teaching rests both on a genuine and selfless concern for students and on the ability to convey to them a love of history.

Eric Foner

There is no 'cat language.' Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one!

Barbara Holland

They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown.

Joseph J. Ellis

My knowledge of myself is direct, synthetic, from within outwards; my knowledge of other persons is indirect, analytical, from outside inwards. My knowledge of myself starts at the core; that of others at the crust.

Salvador de Madariaga

Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.

Carl Sandburg

You have to look at people now that were members of the Klu Klux Klan or whatever else and now are trying to rewrite their personal histories to tell that they've always been tolerant. It's not peculiar to want to sanitize what you did.

Ruth Hanna Sachs

The damage and invisible scars of emotional abuse are very difficult to heal, because memories are imprinted on our minds and hearts and it takes time to be restored. Imprints of past traumas do not mean a person cannot change their future beliefs and behaviors. as people, we do not easily forget. However, as we heal, grieve, and let go, we become clear-minded and focused to live restore and emotionally healthy.

Dee Brown

We could be cowards if we had courage enough.

Thomas Fuller

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.

H.G.Wells

Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.

Philippa Gregory

Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things.

Will Durant

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place -- an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City...a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.

Michel de Certeau

Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first.

Thucydides

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.

Will Durant

Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and the people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedoms.

Edward Gibbon

A proverb is one man's wit and all men's wisdom.

John Russell

If you give up every time you don't achieve the immediate gain you want, you're just guaranteeing that the worst is going to happen... You can't expect an easy victory after one protest march.

Noam Chomsky

Epicurus's old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?

David Hume

If a woman is interested in her own struggle into identity and power, then she will be interested in other women. The lives of these, and other women, show me what a woman can do even without formal power, education, or rights, in a world dominated by men. They are inspirational examples of the strength of the female spirit.

Philippa Gregory

I read them (articles TR wrote on his honeymoon) all over to Edith and her corrections and help were most valuable to me.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answer.

Arthur Schlesinger

The more people that meet each other, the better it is for all of them. ("The Gift Of God").

Fletcher Pratt

... only one man could have been responsible for their deaths: Richard III.

Alison Weir

All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning -- not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.

Michel Foucault

When They Die We Change Our Minds About Them When they die we change our minds about them. While they live we see the plenty hard they’re trying,to be a star, or nice, or wise, and so we do not quite believe them. When they die, suddenly they are what they claimed. Turns out, that’s what one of those looks like. The cold war over manner of manly or mission is over. Same person, same facts and acts, just now a quiet brain stem. We no longer begrudge his or her stupid luck.When they die we change our minds about them. I will try to believe while you yet breathe.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

Carl Sandburg

There are three lessons I would write-Three words, as with a burning pen, In tracings of eternal light,Upon the heart of men.Have hope! though clouds environ round,And gladness hides her face in scorn,Put thou the shadow from thy brow,No night but hath its morn.Have love! not love alone for one, But man as man thy brother call,And scatter like the circling sun,Thy charities on all.

Friedrich Schiller

Emotion as well as reason belongs to the very stuff of history.

Beryl Smalley

Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.

Rebecca Solnit

Tokyo is a very safe city. At night it becomes quiet the way New York never does.

Rick Kennedy

Meditation turns from its purgatory role to recognize in self-knowledge and in the mind's images of the external world the general essences in which all things have their being.

R.W. Southern

Drifting across the vast space, silent except for wind and footsteps, I felt uncluttered and unhurried for the first time in a while, already on desert time.

Rebecca Solnit

History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.

Howard Zinn

[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.

Rebecca Solnit

Humanists were people who wanted to return to ideas found in old Greek and Latin writing of Greece and Rome, written many centuries earlier. Christian Humanists also wanted to get back to these ideas, but they were mainly concerned with learning about the early Christian Church, before it had become involved with money-making and superstition. They wanted to read the books of the early Church, especially the gospels of Christ, in the original language of Greek, so that they would know exactly what the writings meant. The leader of the Christian Humanists was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who attacked superstitions in the Catholic Church in his writing.

Michael A. Mullett

Previous 1 … 7 8 9 10 11 … 20 Next