top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Historian
"And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!"
88
"A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with."
87
"An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia."
85
"American corporations hate to give away money."
85
"Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past."
Past,
84
"The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events."
84
"Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill."
82
"A knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have produced its upheavals, and of society's resources for promoting healthy progress has become of vital concern to our civilization."
81
"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."
81
"For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction."
80
"Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history."
79
"Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge."
77
"Distant replay morphs into instant replay, and future replay cannot be far off."
77
"The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide."
77
"The left has come to regard common sense - the traditional wisdom and folkways of the community - as an obstacle to progress and enlightenment."
76
"Lenin was the first to discover that capitalism 'inevitably' caused war; and he discovered this only when the First World War was already being fought. Of course he was right. Since every great state was capitalist in 1914."
75
"Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law."
74
"Washington's defeat in 1754 was followed by active military preparations on both sides."
74
"It is easy at any moment to surrender a large fortune; to build one up is a difficult and an arduous task."
73
"Our New England climate is mild and equable compared with that of the Platte."
73
"Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself."
73
"The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."
72
"Immigrants do more than help us win our wars, or set up cleaning shops or ethnic restaurants."
71
"Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice."
71
"It's definitely going to be harder than it sounds to acquire millions of users in the U.S. It's going to be a lot of work, and you can't make light of that."
70
"The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers."
70
bottom of page