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Quotes by Historian
"The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses."
5
"The ancient Roman code belongs to a class of which almost every civilised nation in the world can show a sample, and which, so far as the Roman and Hellenic worlds were concerned, were largely diffused over them at epochs not widely distant from one another."
5
"I was myself brought up with my brother, whose name was Matthias, for he was my own brother, by both father and mother; and I made mighty proficiency in the improvements of my learning, and appeared to have both a great memory and understanding."
5
"We also learn that this country and the Western world have no monopoly of goodness and truth and scholarship, we begin to appreciate the ingredients that are indispensable to making a better world. In a life of learning that is, perhaps, the greatest lesson of all."
5
"Nothing is as seductive as the assurance of success."
5
"The search for the truth for truth's sake is the mark of the historian."
5
"A complacent satisfaction with present knowledge is the chief bar to the pursuit of knowledge."
5
"Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection."
4
"To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault."
4
"The most superficial student of Roman history must be struck by the extraordinary degree in which the fortunes of the republic were affected by the presence of foreigners, under different names, on her soil."
4
"In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain."
4
"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."
4
"The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties."
4
"The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color. In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward."
4
"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."
4
"In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers' broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope."
4
"The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion."
4
"A university's essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism - a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else."
4
"The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty."
4
"The epoch of Customary Law, and of its custody by a privileged order, is a very remarkable one."
4
"The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years."
3
"When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future."
3
"The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large."
3
"Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same... Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease."
3
"A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight."
3
"Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them."
3
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