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Quotes by Historian
"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."
18
"If they are afraid of revision in the laboratory, truth will never be released except by accident."
18
"He seemed less in need of a secretary than of someone to listen to him."
18
"Unlike Christianity, which preached a peace that it never achieved, Islam unashamedly came with a sword."
18
"No single characteristic ever overtakes an entire society."
18
"Britain had an air of careless supremacy which GALLED her neighbors."
18
"A manufacturing district... sends out, as it were, suckers into all its neighbourhood."
18
"The knowledge that makes us cherish innocence makes innocence unattainable."
17
"The Roman jurisprudence has the longest known history of any set of human institutions."
17
"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."
17
"There is nothing sane, merciful, heroic, devout, redemptive, wise, holy, loving, peaceful, joyous, righteous, gracious, remotely spiritual, or worthy of praise where mass murder is concerned. We have been in this world long enough to know that by now and to understand that nonviolent conflict resolution informed by mutual compassion is the far better option."
17
"Indeed, one hears, in early Christian theology, as many echoes of Persian dualism as of Hebrew Puritanism or Greek philosophy."
17
"Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip."
17
"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."
17
"Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do."
17
"A great imperative imparts a wonderful impulse to the spirit."
17
"One Cardinal entered his cathedral for the first time at his funeral."
17
"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."
17
"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."
17
"The inquiries of the jurist are in truth prosecuted much as inquiry in physic and physiology was prosecuted before observation had taken the place of assumption."
17
"Confidence is providence."
16
"Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive."
16
"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."
16
"Each one of us is serious individually, but together we become frivolous."
16
"The biographies and autobiographies are on the whole more impressive than the fiction of the last two decades, but the freakish best sellers among them are least likely to withstand the test of time."
16
"How much does a man's effort depend upon the age in which his work is cast? Pope Clement VII."
16
"Civilians who volunteer generally wish to escape, not to share, privatizations worse than their own."
16
"Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion."
16
"The epoch of Customary Law, and of its custody by a privileged order, is a very remarkable one."
16
"Chronicling future appeasing Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain's rise to Parliament from first-generation commercial interests rather than the aristocracy, the author diagnoses even then that he had no center outside himself."
16
"House speaker Thomas read could see the trend, but he could not have changed himself."
15
"And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people-in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good."
15
"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."
15
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