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Quotes by Historian
"Enthusiasm could not supply the place of experience."
32
"If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh."
32
"I'm not sure Lincoln would fare well if he were a presidential candidate today."
32
"Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising."
32
"When I was a child of six or seven my father would show me the chapter in the prophet Isaiah where the name Immanuel is found; more than once he spoke to me of the faith he put in me."
32
"If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do."
32
"Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man."
32
"Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another."
32
"Candor and generosity, unless tempered by due moderation, leads to ruin."
32
"Fill your mind before you empty your mouth."
32
"I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant."
32
"The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples."
32
"When contrasted with the much longer time that life has been present, the course of Christianity thus far is but a brief moment."
32
"Insecure people put others down to raise themselves up."
32
"The notion that Jews are mythic creatures is well circulating in our culture."
32
"I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy."
32
"Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance."
32
"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."
32
"The individual succumbs but he does not die if he has left something to mankind."
32
"Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority."
32
"I'm very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down."
32
"The Roman legions were formed in the first instance of citizen soldiers, who yet had been made to submit to a rigid discipline, and to feel that in that submission lay their strength."
32
"Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure."
32
"The rise of the Dutch Republic must ever be regarded as one of the leading events of modern times."
32
"You become a man not when you reach a certain age, but when you reach a certain state of mind."
32
"The acknowledgement of a single possibility can change everything."
32
"A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense."
32
"Well, it seems to me Lincoln, I suppose, is kind of a model of a particular sort of presidency, a presidency that first of all is elected by a minority of the votes."
31
"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence."
31
"Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising."
31
"It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past."
31
"The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just."
31
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