top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Historian
"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."
31
"We know these men are professionals whose services are up for bid and whose bags are packed, and yet we call them our own and take personal, even civic pride in their accomplishments."
31
"News represents another form of advertising, not liberal propaganda."
31
"Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities."
31
"If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication."
31
"I think that black Africa is extremely terrifying. Black Africa can become a maelstrom of warring tribes without the outside world needing to feel the need to do anything about it."
31
"The more I have studied Lincoln, the more I have followed his thought processes, the more I am convinced that he understood leadership better than any other American president."
31
"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."
31
"On the day I was born, or possibly on one of the following days, my father went on a walk in the forested hills and thought of a name for me. His first son was called Daniel, and Samuel in memory of one of his forefathers."
31
"It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men."
31
"With my ninth mind I resurrect my firstand dance slow to the music of my soul made new."
31
"The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer."
31
"The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning."
31
"The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement, explain American development."
31
"The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings."
31
"And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world."
31
"It's nice to be liked, but it's better to be respected."
31
"The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that."
31
"Although when Christianity appeared the total population of the planet was only a fraction of that of the twentieth century, most of the earth's surface was quite outside the Mediterranean world, Persia, India, and China."
31
"The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event."
31
"Experience has ceded to a series of happenings, about which the most we can expect is information."
31
"Television has made places look alike, and it has transformed the way we see. A whole generation of Americans, maybe two, has grown up looking at the world through a lens."
31
"Partisanship is our great curse. We too readily assume that everything has two sides and that it is our duty to be on one or the other."
Duty,
31
bottom of page