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Quotes by Historian
"Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years."
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"As to the Indians, the guiding principle was, promise them anything just so long as they get out of the way."
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"We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey."
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"It is true that the politician, in his professional character, does not always, or even very often, conform to the most approved pattern of private conduct."
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"Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim."
1
"The Germanic invasions destroyed neither the Mediterranean unity of the ancient world, nor what may be regarded as the truly essential features of the Roman culture as it still existed in the 5th century, at a time when there was no longer an Emperor in the West."
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"The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature."
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"The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination."
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"When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near."
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"We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change."
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"Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."
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"Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there."
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"The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand."
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"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
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"More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you past time itself."
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"The great medley of Oregon and California emigrants, at their camps around Independence, had heard reports that several additional parties were on the point of setting out from St. Joseph's farther to the northward."
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"Miracles happen to those who believe in them."
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"Relentless improvement of the product and upgrading of consumer tastes are the heart of mass merchandising."
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"The same historical development that turned the citizen into a client transformed the worker from a producer into a consumer."
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"Trial by jury. Live wherever you can make a living. How could a government based on such principles fail?"
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"The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular."
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"Everyone agrees to that; but when we come to define truth, dissension starts."
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"My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India."
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"But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."
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"The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event."
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"Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion."
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"Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances."
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"Reading your own material aloud forces you to listen."
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"Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training."
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"All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire."
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