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Quotes by Historian
"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."
103
"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."
103
"Of all possessions a friend is the most precious."
101
"There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom."
91
"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."
90
"Physical nature lies at our feet shackled with a hundred chains. What of the control of human nature? Do not point to the triumphs of psychiatry, social services or the war against crime. Domination of human nature can only mean the domination of every man by himself."
85
"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."
73
"The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines."
66
"I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early."
65
"A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection."
62
"My mental approach is totally different. My coach predicated everything on defense. He always talked about defense, defense, defense. I took it to heart that if you play defense, you can take the heart from an offensive player."
61
"To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god."
60
"Thus, in accordance with the spirit of the Historical School, knowledge of the principles of the human world falls within that world itself, and the human sciences form an independent system."
58
"Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless."
57
"It is simply not true that war is solely a means to an end, nor do people necessarily fight in order to obtain this objective or that. In fact, the opposite is true: people very often take up one objective or another precisely in order that they may fight."
57
"Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich."
56
"Affairs that depend on many rarely succeed."
55
"Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out."
53
"Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself."
52
"I received an honorary doctorate for my work. Maybe one of these works is considered the equivalent of a Ph.D."
Work,
51
"Once I grew from 6'1" to about 6'6", by that time I was going into 12th grade, and that's when I started wanting to play basketball, because, pretty much basketball players always got the girl."
50
"It's much more difficult to work on a broad subject than on a specific one, because even if it's hard to find the information, if you look hard enough for something specific you will find it, and you will discover things that you wouldn't have thought of before."
47
"History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are."
47
"History is Philosophy teaching by examples."
47
"A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with."
44
"When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British."
43
"Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom."
43
"The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide."
42
"Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response."
41
"Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past."
Past,
39
"For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction."
39
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