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Quotes by Historian
"People are so helpful. People will stop what they're doing to show you something, to walk with you through a section of the town, or explain how a suspension bridge really works."
50
"A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man."
50
"But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding."
50
"My earliest memory is dreamlike: in a small orchard or garden I am carried on the arm, I believe, of my father; there was a group of grown-ups, my mother among them, and the group was slowly walking in the orchard, it seems toward the house."
50
"Far from being the product of a democratic revolution and of an opposition to English institutions, the constitution of the United States was the result of a powerful reaction against democracy, and in favor of the traditions of the mother country."
50
"We have to make philosophy itself an object of philosophical concern."
50
"A few hours' ride brought us to the banks of the river Kansas."
50
"A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn."
50
"Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."
50
"Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape."
50
"The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion."
50
"Even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich."
50
"There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence."
50
"Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning."
50
"Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church."
50
"Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity."
50
"The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images."
50
"Great writers are the saints for the godless."
50
"In some of the middle colonies the towns and counties were both active and had a relation with each other which was the forerunner of the present system of local government in the Western States."
50
"Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all."
50
"It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they're not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans."
50
"The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek."
50
"It is better that a guilty man should not be brought to trial than that he should be acquitted."
Man,
50
"A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well."
49
"Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances."
49
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