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Quotes by Historian
"The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event."
10
"In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs."
10
"Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it."
10
"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,
10
"The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image."
10
"Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come."
10
"If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself."
10
"But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him."
10
"I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one."
10
"The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes "sight-seeing.""
10
"Rainer Maria Rilke greeted and wrestled with the angels of his Duino Elegies in the solitude of a castle surrounded by white cliffs tall trees and the sea. I greeted most of mine in the solitude of a house that still vibrated with the throbs of a singular life that had helped shape many lives and with the ache of attempts to render useful service to that life. The River of Winged Dreams was therefore constructed as a link between dimensions of past and future emotions and intellect and matter and spirit."
10
"No law can possibly meet the convenience of every one: we must be satisfied if it be beneficial on the whole and to the majority."
10
"Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy."
10
"The old charters of Massachusetts, Virginia, and the Carolinas had given title to strips of territory extending from the Atlantic westward to the Pacific."
Old,
10
"One half who graduate from college never read another book."
10
"Christianity emerged from the religion of Israel. Or rather, it has as its background a persistent strain in that religion. To that strain Christians have looked back, and rightly, as the preparation in history for their faith."
9
"We secure our friends not by accepting favors but by doing them."
9
"The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution."
9
"No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."
9
"The Roman jurisprudence has the longest known history of any set of human institutions."
9
"Freedom was conditioned by man's physical body, heredity, and environment."
9
"A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in."
9
"The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just."
9
"No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision."
9
"Well, if they are trying to kill you, on the whole they're the people you have to kill, aren't they?"
9
"The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority."
9
"We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready - even eager - to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it."
9
"Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists."
9
"In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli."
9
"He who overcomes himself is divine. Most see their ruin before their eyes; but they go on into it."
9
"Soldiers, when committed to a task, can't compromise. It's unrelenting devotion to the standards of duty and courage, absolute loyalty to others, not letting the task go until it's been done."
9
"Nowhere are our calculations more frequently upset than in war."
9
"Even before Watergate and his resignation, Nixon had inspired conflicting and passionate emotions."
9
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