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Quotes by Historian
"Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children."
30
"No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past."
30
"Often the best advice is not to seek advice."
30
"The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years."
30
"Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things."
30
"Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it."
30
"The more business one has, the more you are able to accomplish, for you learn to economize your time."
30
"Curiosity is idle only to those who fail to realize that it may be a very rare and indispensable thing."
30
"Disorder is the least tolerable up sinful conditions."
30
"Stop complaining and start living."
30
"Oftentimes during the period in which conventions really did business, you had situations where the delegates were divided and you would have ballot after ballot before there was a final nominee."
30
"An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic."
30
"The susceptibility of the average modern to pictorial suggestion enables advertising to exploit his lessened power of judgment."
30
"We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
30
"The dancing vortex of a sacred metaphor clashes horns and halos to make wounded music set to the tempo of a new era in brilliant labor."
30
"Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists."
29
"In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli."
29
"The smaller the function, the greater the management."
29
"Greatness is so often a courteous synonym for great success."
29
"It is the goal of the American university to be the brains of the republic."
29
"Could I interrupt here, because there is an alternative explanation, which you are particularly well placed to examine. You know the argument that it is the alchemists in the laboratories who invent the sweet new kits."
29
"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."
29
"If you are not working towards something, your life will end with nothing."
29
"Politics as battle has given way to politics as spectacle."
29
"Great men's value increases with age."
29
"And so while the great ones depart to their dinner, the secretary stays, growing thinner and thinner, racking his brain to record and report what he thinks that they think that they ought to have thought."
29
"Success is little more than a chemical compound of man with moment."
29
"Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feelingin a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman."
29
"But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."
29
"A righteous wife is a respectful wife."
29
"I can fairly be called an amateur because I do what I do, in the original sense of the word - for love, because I love it. On the other hand, I think that those of us who make our living writing history can also be called true professionals."
29
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