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Quotes by Historian
"Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work."
36
"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,
36
"Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one."
36
"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.""
36
"The tribal pull of patriotism could have no better testimony."
36
"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."
35
"Well, if they are trying to kill you, on the whole they're the people you have to kill, aren't they?"
35
"One sometimes feels a guest of one's time and not a member of its household."
35
"Thus the whole country was broken into many shreds and patches of sovereignty."
35
"Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists."
35
"Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its symbol is a smile button."
35
"The National League was born the following year, as an attempt to exert the control of capital over labor."
35
"Righteousness is easy in retrospect."
35
"Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get."
35
"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."
35
"The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises."
35
"Success is little more than a chemical compound of man with moment."
35
"The most that one of Jewish faith can do - and some have gladly done it - is to say that Jesus was the greatest in the long succession of Jewish prophets. None can acknowledge that Jesus was the Messiah without becoming a Christian."
35
"Enormity of the stakes became the new self-hypnosis."
35
"The Englishman, as an American observed, felt himself the best-governed citizen in the world, even when in opposition he believed the incumbents were ruining the country."
35
"In proportion that property is small, the danger of misusing the franchisee is great."
35
"No less a bold and pugnacious figure than Winston Churchill broke down and was unable to finish his remarks at the sendoff of the British Expeditionary Force into the maelstrom of World War I in Europe."
35
"Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors."
35
"Grow strong, my comrade that you may standUnshaken when I fall; that I may knowThe shattered fragments of my song will comeAt last to finer melody in you;That I may tell my heart that you beginWhere passing I leave off, and fathom more."
34
"He has not yet become an elder statesman, though his foreign policy credentials are considerable, but he is certainly our ancient mariner, forever tugging at our sleeve to let him tell his tale of what really happened."
34
"In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not."
34
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