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Quotes by Historian


"Like their predecessors, the Presidents of today just throw up their hands."

"Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches."


"Few things are brought to a successful issue by impetuous desire, but most by calm and prudent forethought."


"If there were a science of human beings it would be anthropology that aims at understanding the totality of experience through structural context."

"Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express."


"Common sense varies among the young, as among the old."

"Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject."


"I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income."

"Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels."

"Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer."

"The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information."

"If you cannot do great things in life, make sure you do the small things in a great way."


"The American Constitution is the greatest governing document, and at some 7,000 words, just about the shortest."

"The strongest bank in the United States will last only so long as the people will have sufficient confidence in it to keep their money there."

"The return we reap from generous actions is not always evident."

"The mere imparting of information is not education."


"To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say."

"But the citizens of Cincinnati loved their Reds because they won, no matter what their addresses had been the year before. They rooted for the Old-English 'C' on the players' shirts."
Old,

"Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity."


"We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality."

"You become a man not when you reach a certain age, but when you reach a certain state of mind."

"England and France were rivals, not only on the continent, but in the West Indies, in India, and in Europe."

"The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice anything for himself."

"The different ness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess."

"From the beginning of the presidential nominating conventions in the 1830's really through the 1950's, you had conventions that actually did real business."


"Who today is willing to say that Texas and California and the remainder of the Southwest would be better off if they were governed by Mexico?"

"If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own."
Man,
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