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Quotes by Historian
"Many of the Iroquois and Huron houses were of similar construction, the partitions being at the sides only, leaving a wide passage down the middle of the house."
11
"An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic."
11
"For me, the card catalog has been a companion all my working life. To leave it is like leaving the house one was brought up in."
Life,
11
"No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been."
11
"The existence of inherent limits of experience in no way settles the question about the subordination of facts of the human world to our knowledge of matter."
11
"The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take."
11
"Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy."
11
"Age acquires no value save through thought and discipline."
10
"Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness."
10
"There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying."
10
"The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin."
10
"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."
10
"When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase."
10
"He has not yet become an elder statesman, though his foreign policy credentials are considerable, but he is certainly our ancient mariner, forever tugging at our sleeve to let him tell his tale of what really happened."
10
"We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place."
10
"The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule."
10
"The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving."
10
"Many difficulties which nature throws in our way, may be smoothed away by the exercise of intelligence."
10
"So if 1960 had occurred under the old convention system, Kennedy would have had a very hard time getting the Democratic nomination because he would have been rejected by all those people who had worked with him in Washington."
10
"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers."
10
"One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim."
10
"The readings of Soviet society are as many as the experts you speak to. In my view, it's a society that is overdue for measures of democratization and organization."
10
"But having said all of that, that still doesn't account for a lot of the increase in popularity which stems, I think, from Lincoln's personal characteristics."
10
"There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can't rely on any of these things to see you through. Circumstances do that."
10
"Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button."
10
"You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature."
10
"As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves."
10
"In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not."
10
"The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people."
10
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