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Quotes by Historian


"To be a slaveholder meant one had to regard the African American as inferior in every way."

"I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills."


"As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines."

"Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule."


"The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife."

"I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes."

"Oftentimes during the period in which conventions really did business, you had situations where the delegates were divided and you would have ballot after ballot before there was a final nominee."

"The old charters of Massachusetts, Virginia, and the Carolinas had given title to strips of territory extending from the Atlantic westward to the Pacific."
Old,

"When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out."
Work,


"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."

"And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race."

"Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible."

"With the question of the effect of a poem, the topic of investigation shifts from that of textual autonomy to textual reception - to the issue of what we actually look for or find in reading a poem."

"When the Chinese first came to San Francisco, they were actually welcomed by the mayor and they had special ceremonies for them-again this is when their colony was very small, only a few Chinese."

"Unlike metaphor, metonymy does not try to fuse images together."

"There are now hundreds of thousands of new engineers that are being trained in China. If people start finding themselves losing their jobs, not to the Chinese here but because China has become such a dominant force - then there could very well be a backlash."

"Soldiers, when committed to a task, can't compromise. It's unrelenting devotion to the standards of duty and courage, absolute loyalty to others, not letting the task go until it's been done."

"The smaller the function, the greater the management."


"Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions."

"If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto."
Will,

"More emphasis was thus thrown upon the local governments than in England."

"George Orwell's contention was that it is a sure sign of trouble when things can no longer be called by their right names and described in plain, forthright speech."

"We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may explain everything else, cannot explain itself."


"In 1945, there were more people killed, more buildings destroyed, more high explosives set off, more fires burning than before or since."

"I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens - Thackeray himself."

"The growth of constitutional government, as we now understand it, was promoted by the establishment of two different sets of machinery for making laws and carrying on government."

"If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh."


"Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain."


"No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does."

"The issue, perhaps, boils down to one of how perceptions or misperceptions of racial difference impact various individuals', or groups of individuals', experience of freedom in America. Some would argue that it goes beyond hampering their 'pursuit of happiness' to outright obliterating it."


"Trial by jury. Live wherever you can make a living. How could a government based on such principles fail?"

"It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help."


"Neither Johnson nor his party nor the government as a whole were willing to raise, train, equip, and then send Vietnam sufficient manpower to do the job."

"This is what our love is""a sacred pattern of unbroken unity sewn flawlessly invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds."
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