Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Historians - Page 17

There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible - the new normal.

On several occasions, we are informed that the professional ideal 'took steps', 'organised assaults', and 'selected social problems'. But this is anthropomorphic metaphor implausibly masquerading as historical explanation.

A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.

As a strong and proud and intelligent Black man I have no problem expressing my respect for and adoration of the Black woman. Simply put, I love you. I love the Black woman.

Filipinos are not a reading people, and despite the compulsory course on the life and works of Rizal today, from the elementary to the university levels, it is accepted that the 'Noli me Tangere' and 'El Filibusterismo' are highly regarded but seldom read (if not totally ignored). Therefore one asks, how can unread novels exert any influence?

Pushing ahead with a self-emancipatory agenda is critical, but we must do so fully conscious of this broader context of our development efforts.

The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims.

One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged.

Whenever the powers of government are placed in any hands other than those of the community, whether those of one man, of a few, or of several, those principles of human nature which imply that government is at all necessary, imply that those persons will make use of them to defeat the very end for which government exists.

[Having] appropriated to itself all conscious intelligence in the universe ...Man faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe ...and the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view-i.e., in a man-made environment that is increasingly mechanistic, atomized, soulless, and self-destructive.

It gives me a huge buzz when people say they've enjoyed my books, because this grew out of a hobby, and it's an absolute passion, and it's lovely when I get feedback.

The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.

What are the 10 major legacies that European colonization have left behind? Issues of illiteracy. Issues of ill health. Issues of poor infrastructure. Issues of backward agricultural economies. And it goes on.

Like so much of what is worthwhile in life, our needs for friendship are often best met in the home. If our children feel friendship within the family, with each other, and with parents, they will not be desperate for acceptance outside the family. I think one of life’s most satisfying accomplishments for my wife and me is to have lived long enough to see our children become good friends.

A small foot in China, no different from a tiny waist in Victorian England, represented the height of female refinement. For families with marriageable daughters, foot size translated into its own form of currency and a means of achieving upward mobility. The most desirable bride possessed a three-inch foot, known as a 'golden lotus.'

Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses.

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

The Emergency Banking Act reached back in time to amend the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which had originally been intended to criminalize economic intercourse between American citizens and declared enemies of the United States.

For women, Neo-Confucianism placed extra emphasis on chastity, obedience, and diligence. A good wife should have no desire other than to serve her husband, no ambition other than to produce a son, and no interest beyond subjugating herself to her husband's family - meaning, among other things, she must never remarry if widowed.

As president of the American Historical Association, I started a programme to make dissertations into e-books in 1999. Before I knew it, I was involved in other electronic projects. Harvard invited me to become director of the libraries in 2007.

The primary function of a constitution was to mark out the boundaries of governmental powers-hence in England, where there was no constitution , there were no limits (save for the effect of trail by jury) to what the legislature might do.

Where the people possess no authority, their rights obtain no respect.

I hope that the Palestinians don't make the mistake of unleashing a new intifada. They've tried it twice before, and the consequences were bad for both sides. But I don't think the forces are there (that could carry out) an uprising against the leadership. The people that could initiate it are in Israeli prisons. And what could they hope to achieve? In the end, they're too weak to end the Israeli occupation.

A well-behaved woman seldom makes history

The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760's was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640's, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

The facts of life are very stubborn things.

The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.

Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can't shake.

A nation that forgets its past can function no better than an individual with amnesia.

In nine times out of ten, the slanderous tongue belongs to a disappointed person.

The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.

No man is quite so much a hero in the dark as in broad daylight, in solitude as in society, in the gloom of the churchyard as in the blaze of the drawing-room. The season and the place may be such as to oppress the stoutest heart with a mysterious awe, which, if not fear, is near akin to it.

I'm not sure Lincoln would fare well if he were a presidential candidate today.

If you spend time alone in the wilderness, you get very attuned to living things.

Given the gruesome fate of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, and the fact that five of the previous 12 Romanov rulers were also murdered, it is easy to regard Russia's imperial dynasty as cursed.

The best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian.

The opera is like a husband with a foreign title - expensive to support, hard to understand and therefore a supreme social challenge.

When God made the planet, he made the plants, he made the animals, he made the Sun and the Moon, and he made us, and we're all interconnected, and when we disregard, disrespect, or damage any part of it, we do violence against creation.

There were about 30 children at one stage, running around like savages at a place called Callow Hill, near Monmouth, which was owned by my grandparents. They lived in the big house, but my dad had five brothers and a sister, and they all lived in various houses scattered on the hill.

Christianity is part of the Common Law of England.

If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

From the beginning of the presidential nominating conventions in the 1830's really through the 1950's, you had conventions that actually did real business.

It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.

I think what art is always doing is making us see the world so differently, and I don't mean just colors and light, but re-thinking relationships, spatial relationships, psychological relationships ... those who gravitate to the art world actually want to be puzzled.

Our work is the presentation of our capabilities.

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism.

The whole territory of the Netherlands was girt with forests.

Dishonesty is so grasping it would deceive God himself, were it possible.

Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

He was a great thundering paradox of a man.

Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.

It is true that the aristocracies seem to have abused their monopoly of legal knowledge; and at all events their exclusive possession of the law was a formidable impediment to the success of those popular movements which began to be universal in the western world.

It's one of the great mysteries to me how anybody who has ever believed in socialism can conceivably vote for Blair or New Labour, which is further to the right of any Tory government apart from that of John Major, and is taking privatisation into realms unheard-of.

The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change.

We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are.