Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Historians - Page 16

Hinduism's basic tenet is that many roads exist by which men have pursued and still pursue their quest for the truth and that none has universal validity.

Rome has grown since its humble beginnings that it is now overwhelmed by its own greatness.

Like the assassination of JFK, everybody alive then can remember where they were that Doomsday Week of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. That Saturday, 27 October, was, and remains, the closest the world has come to nuclear holocaust - the blackest day of a horrendous week.

Nothing is inevitable until it happens.

Serenity is the balance between good and bad, life and death, horrors and pleasures. Life is, as it were, defined by death. If there wasn't death of things, then there wouldn't be any life to celebrate.

The Antichrist is often identified with the second beast in the Book of Revelation that arises from the land, the beast that tries to make everyone worship the power of evil.

Unlike art, the consumption of fashion is not based primarily on knowledge or education but functions through visual awareness, a type of sensuality and perception of the corporeal self.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.

The vanity of loving fine clothes and new fashion, and placing value on ourselves by them is one of the most childish pieces of folly.

History rarely repeats itself, but its echoes never go away.

Artists of all sorts remain youthful for so long, and in many cases attain a grand old age. The explanation is that they live in an almost permanent condition of stimulation and excitement.

A new future requires a new past.

The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.

I think the sign of complacency in the stock market is when people don't worry. At the moment, everyone worries about everything. They worry about geopolitical risk, about political risk, they worry that the markets are too high. The time to really worry is when everyone thinks that markets are going up and everything is going really well.

If the Pilgrims had landed in Santa Monica Bay rather than Boston, we'd have six states out here!

I believe that the only alternative Israel has to save itself as a Jewish state - and let's be frank about that: the Jewish state is predicated on having a Jewish majority - the only way we can do that is by unilaterally withdrawing our border and withdrawing our settlements in the West Bank.

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.

Revolution is the most dramatic appearance of a conscious people.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.

As she sallied forth from her boudoir, you would never have guessed how quickly she could strip for action.

My view as a historian is that the empire was an extractive, exploitative, racist and violent institution and that the history of empire is one we need to confront and come to terms with, rather than celebrate.

No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

The important thing when you are going to do something brave is to have someone on hand to witness it.

If all Henry Kissinger contributed to the Middle East were a regional arms race, petrodollar addiction, Iranian radicalization, and the Tehran-Riyadh conflict, it would be bad enough. His legacy, however, is far worse than that: He has to answer for his role in the rise of political Islam.

Hitler was unapproachable and impenetrable even for those in his close company.

So much of the bitterness that the term 'McCarthyism' evokes refers to the probe begun in New Jersey in the summer of 1953 - both in the laboratories of Fort Monmouth and in the surrounding communities of Red Bank and Belmar, where some of the best scientists and engineers in America worked.

Many of the political jokes that circulated in the Third Reich were directed at Goering. He collected them [all] in a large leather notebook and delighted in re-telling most of them to his friends.

The logic of all this seems to be that it is all right for young people in a democracy to learn about any civilization or social theory that is not dangerous, but that they should remain entirely ignorant of any civilization or social theory that might be dangerous on the ground that what you don't know can't hurt you ... a complete denial of the democratic principle that the general diffusion of knowledge and learning through the community is essential to the preservation of free government.

Nothing is impossible to the man who will

Writers are frequently asked why they wrote their first book. A more interesting answer might come from asking them why they wrote their second one.

Any time the Western way of war can be unleashed on an enemy stupid enough to enter its arena, victory is assured.

I received an honorary doctorate for my work. Maybe one of these works is considered the equivalent of a Ph.D.

In the real life-process, willing, feeling, and thinking are only different aspects.

The first meeting-houses were often built in the valleys, in the meadow lands; for the dwelling-houses must be clustered around them, since the colonists were ordered by law to build their new homes within half a mile of the meeting-house.

The so-called second New Deal of 1935 - including the Works Progress Administration, Social Security and the Wagner Act legalizing union labor - represented an effort to meet the rising voices demanding a more aggressive government approach to the collapse of national prosperity.

The famous convention of 1787 met in Philadelphia to define the additional powers needed to enable Congress to do its job effectively. Instead, the convention proposed a brand new national government.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.

Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words.

If the house is to be set in the order, one cannot begin with the present; he must begin with the past

One knows something is important when the powers that be choose not to acknowledge it in public.

For all its ubiquity and its universality, war offers the attraction of the extraordinary - the escape from the gray everyday, from the humdrum into higher things.

I believe the Palestinians have never indicated a willingness to meet our minimum requirements, which are recognition of Israel's permanence and legitimacy as a Jewish state and end of claims and end of conflict.

Nothing baffles the schemes of evil people so much as the calm composure of great souls.

Every morning, read seriously and reverently a portion of the Holy Scriptures, and acquaint yourselves with the history and doctrine thereof. It is a book full of light and wisdom, will make you wise to eternal life, and furnish you with directions and principles to guide and order your life safely and prudently.

Bulgaria was the only Axis country to deflect insistent German demands for the deportation of its Jews.

I have three kids in Britain, and I am there at least once a month.

The memoirs of the Grand Duchess Olga are an entertaining record for anyone interested in the imperial family's home life during the last years of Russian autocracy.

There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.

The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone.

It is a great matter to be in authority over others; for authority, if it be rightly used, will make you feared beyond your actual resources.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.

Unlike monarchs, who pass power to their heirs at the moment of death to ensure the survival of the regime, tyrants must simply survive as long as possible.

A good man would prefer to be defeated than to defeat injustice by evil means.

The far object of a training system is to prepare the combat officer mentally so that he can cope with the unusual and unexpected as if it were the altogether normal and give him poise in a situation where all else is in disequilibrium.

War itself is the enemy of the human race.