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Quotes by Historian
"There isn't much in the way of pure communist spirit, because the whole nation seems to be engaged in capitalistic enterprises. Much of the country still operates under government control."
2
"At the beginning, Lincoln was so inexperienced he had reverence for military expertise, not realizing that there wasn't any military expertise, that the most anybody had commanded up to that point had been somebody, some troops in the Mexican War, and it had been years ago."
2
"As we advance in life, we learn the limits of our abilities."
2
"I was able to sit at Lincoln's side and see how he thought and how he acted, and how he felt about what was going on around him. I felt the pressures that were on him. You can see what people were writing to him, how they were nudging him."
2
"Compared with the thousands of years in which human life has been on this planet, Christianity is a recent development."
2
"A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn."
2
"I was too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam."
2
"Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses."
2
"I'm not sure Lincoln would fare well if he were a presidential candidate today."
2
"The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information."
2
"The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion."
2
"Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get."
2
"No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does."
2
"The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses."
2
"Conscience is the mirror of our souls, which represents the errors of our lives in their full shape."
2
"The populace is like the sea motionless in itself, but stirred by every wind, even the lightest breeze."
2
"Hitler's dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law."
2
"It is needless to say how great has been the influence of the doctrine of Evolution, or rather perhaps of the method of investigation to which it has given birth, upon the study of history, especially the history of institutions."
2
"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."
2
"The ancient Roman code belongs to a class of which almost every civilised nation in the world can show a sample, and which, so far as the Roman and Hellenic worlds were concerned, were largely diffused over them at epochs not widely distant from one another."
2
"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."
2
"Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage."
2
"It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own."
2
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