top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Historian
"One certain effect of war is to diminish freedom of expression."
34
"Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconsciousness with habits and values."
34
"Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them."
34
"I can see that you are a true historian because you really always ought to ask that question about anybody at a different place or a different time: What's the same and what's different?"
34
"Politics as battle has given way to politics as spectacle."
34
"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."
34
"My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India."
34
"Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind."
34
"What other country has had the privilege of making the world's heart beat faster?"
34
"The utility of perseverance in absurdity is more than I could ever discern. Edmund Burke."
34
"To the anonymous reviewer of George F. Kennan's book, Russia Leaves the War, who wrote in the Times Literary Supplement (London), January 4, 1957, this sentence: "We still do not know at any level that really matters, why Wilson took the fateful decision to bring the United States into the First World War," I would like to say hello."
34
"Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it."
34
"One half who graduate from college never read another book."
34
"I think that the U.S. does have this very much more open attitude, and I admire it very much and I think it's very important to the world. But the information and the discussion sometimes come too late, after the effective decision has been made."
34
"I don't care tuppence whether I'm forced into a leadership position or not. I'd much sooner not."
33
"Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition."
33
"What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself."
33
"Dishonesty is so grasping it would deceive God himself, were it possible."
33
"In government as well as in trade a new era came to the colonies in 1763."
33
"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."
33
"When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near."
33
"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
33
"The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses."
33
"Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading."
33
"The scene is France. The theater is the world."
33
"A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit."
33
"I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what a great many young men on both sides felt and believed and were brave enough to do."
33
"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."
33
"No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society."
33
"The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost."
33
"Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy."
33
bottom of page