Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Donald Kagan

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American historian Donald Kagan.

Last updated on April 19, 2025.

Donald Kagan was a Lithuanian-born American historian and classicist at Yale University specializing in ancient Greece, notable for his four-volume history of the Peloponnesian War. He formerly taught in the Department of History at Cornell University. Kagan was considered among the foremost American scholars of Greek history.

American - Historian | Born: 1932

Source: Wikipedia

From the time I was a little boy I found myself reading history when I had a choice. I read a lot of things, but history had a special appeal for me.

Donald Kagan

Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.

Donald Kagan

Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.

Donald Kagan

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?

Donald Kagan

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

Donald Kagan

You have to liberate yourself first from the prejudices of the world in which you live.

Donald Kagan

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.

Donald Kagan

We, to some degree, are like what we are because we inherited certain things from the Greeks and the Romans. One of them that's so striking is the whole area of politics.

Donald Kagan

In Our Underachieving Colleges, [Derek] Bok acts as both diagnostician and healer, wielding social-science statistics and professional studies to trace the etiology of today's illnesses and to recommend palliative treatments for what he has discovered.

Donald Kagan

War has been more common than peace, and extended periods of peace have been rare in a world divided into multiple states

Donald Kagan

I can see that you [Bruce Cole] 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?

Donald Kagan

Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Donald Kagan

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