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Quotes by Historian
"Discount air fares, a car in every parking space and the interstate highway system have made every place accessible - and every place alike."
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"He has not yet become an elder statesman, though his foreign policy credentials are considerable, but he is certainly our ancient mariner, forever tugging at our sleeve to let him tell his tale of what really happened."
"Politics as battle has given way to politics as spectacle."
"There is a curious relationship between a candidate and the reporters who cover him. It can be affected by small things like a competent press staff, enough seats, sandwiches and briefings and the ability to understand deadlines."
"Television has made places look alike, and it has transformed the way we see. A whole generation of Americans, maybe two, has grown up looking at the world through a lens."
"We must never throw away a bushel of truth because it happens to contain a few grains of chaff."
"The true call of a Christian is not to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things in an extraordinary way."
"Unlike Christianity, which preached a peace that it never achieved, Islam unashamedly came with a sword."
"For me archaeology is not a source of illustrations for written texts, but an independent source of historical information, with no less value and importance, sometimes more importance, that the written sources."
"For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals."
"Imperialism was genuinely popular among Athenians who would expect to share in its profits, even if only indirectly and collectively, and not to have to bear its burdens."
"Overall, the anarchy was the most creative of all periods of Japanese culture for in it there appeared the greatest landscape painting, the culmination of the skill of landscape gardening and the arts of flower arrangement, and the No drama."
"The Commonwealth has had consistently bad press. It was originally seen as a kind of hangover empire. People have long predicted its demise."
"No politician has ever yet been able to rule his country, nor has any country ever yet been able to face the world, upon the principles of the Sermon on the Mount."
"It is true that the politician, in his professional character, does not always, or even very often, conform to the most approved pattern of private conduct."
"History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are."
"A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia."
"Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all."
"Nothing is as seductive as the assurance of success."
"In an age where history is recorded on T-shirts, the very notion of dwelling on the deep structure of an experience has come to appear both arcane and archaic."
"Experience has ceded to a series of happenings, about which the most we can expect is information."
"A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense."
"A jacket commemorating the Germans as champions of the 1990 World Cup is out of date two weeks after the event has passed."
"With the question of the effect of a poem, the topic of investigation shifts from that of textual autonomy to textual reception - to the issue of what we actually look for or find in reading a poem."
"Unlike metaphor, metonymy does not try to fuse images together."
"Still the question remains of what actually speaks in a poem, if not subjectivity as historically constructed."
"Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible."
"The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole."
"Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows."
"No people do so much harm as those who go about doing good."
"If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot."
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