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Quotes by Historian
"Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things."
40
"A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality."
40
"The English race is the best at weeping and the worst at laughing."
40
"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."
40
"So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean."
40
"If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say 'Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history."
40
"The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive."
40
"Embrace the pain to inherit the gain."
40
"I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one."
40
"Nothing can stop an enemy from picking wireless messages out of the free air - and nothing did."
40
"The Roman legions were formed in the first instance of citizen soldiers, who yet had been made to submit to a rigid discipline, and to feel that in that submission lay their strength."
40
"Neoclassical economics insists that advertising cannot force consumers to buy anything they don't already want to buy."
40
"Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure."
40
"An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic."
40
"Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made."
39
"The very exercise of leadership fosters capacity for it."
39
"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers."
39
"To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious."
39
"Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities."
39
"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."
39
"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."
39
"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."
39
"If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication."
39
"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."
39
"House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own."
39
"Great men have great discipline."
39
"History is an excellent teacher with few pupils."
39
"Elegance is timeless."
39
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