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Quotes by Historian
"The populace is like the sea motionless in itself, but stirred by every wind, even the lightest breeze."
12
"It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men."
12
"My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader."
12
"I see the great continuities in New Zealand history as being decency and common sense and up until now when we've confronted these things we've been able to talk them through, and I'm sure we will with this issue as well."
12
"It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own."
12
"My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India."
12
"Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man."
12
"But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."
12
"Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion."
12
"That free will was demonstrated in the placing of temptation before man with the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree which would give him a knowledge of good and evil, with the disturbing moral conflict to which that awareness would give rise."
12
"Candor and generosity, unless tempered by due moderation, leads to ruin."
12
"The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings."
12
"Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library."
12
"Although when Christianity appeared the total population of the planet was only a fraction of that of the twentieth century, most of the earth's surface was quite outside the Mediterranean world, Persia, India, and China."
12
"Experience has ceded to a series of happenings, about which the most we can expect is information."
12
"To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."
12
"Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be."
12
"Washington and Jefferson were both rich Virginia planters, but they were never friends."
12
"The more business one has, the more you are able to accomplish, for you learn to economize your time."
12
"It is difficult to describe in short the enthusiasm and devotion provoked by and given to my research. We lived almost in poverty. I used pencils, two for a nickel, and could not buy a fountain pen, when I lost mine."
12
"Truth, they say, is but too often in difficulties, but is never finally suppressed."
12
"You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history."
12
"American corporations hate to give away money."
12
"The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole."
12
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