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Quotes by Historian
"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."
49
"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."
46
"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."
41
"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."
39
"A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection."
36
"Affairs that depend on many rarely succeed."
31
"I received an honorary doctorate for my work. Maybe one of these works is considered the equivalent of a Ph.D."
Work,
30
"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."
30
"History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. History is who we are and why we are the way we are."
30
"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."
30
"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."
28
"Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out."
28
"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."
26
"Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich."
25
"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,
24
"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder."
23
"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."
22
"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."
21
"It's definitely going to be harder than it sounds to acquire millions of users in the U.S. It's going to be a lot of work, and you can't make light of that."
20
"Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law."
19
"The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines."
17
"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."
16
"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."
16
"The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment."
14
"Christianity is usually called a religion. As a religion it has had a wider geographic spread and is more deeply rooted among more peoples than any other religion in the history of mankind."
14
"We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance."
13
"A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with."
13
"Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning."
13
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