Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Historians - Page 19

People who teach American history survey classes have a lot of ground to cover and tend to focus on landmarks. You get through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and you have to get to the beginning of the 20th century fast. It's pretty easy to go lightly on the Gilded Age.

What was the American Revolution? The people who joined to carry it out had different views of what they had done.

The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.

It's a very Aboriginal thing to do, to give younger people greater responsibilities within the community as they become able to take those responsibilities on. It is a culturally appropriate transfer of roles that involves respect in both directions.. from the younger to the older and the older to the younger.

What is terrifying is the ability, through mass brainwashing or propaganda, to change normal human instinct, which does not necessarily contain very much hatred.

Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental.

There's a moment when you say, "Okay, I'm not going to become a dancer. I'm not going to become a painter." So in a sense, I ended up writing about those big conflicts that I felt.

Did Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews furnish structural material for Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon? It has been pointed out in these pages that there are many things in the former book that might well have suggested many major things in the other.Not a few things merely, one or two, or half dozen, but many; and it is this fact of many things of similarity and the cumulative force of them that makes them so serious a menace to Joseph Smith's story of the Book of Mormon's origin

If nature had produced spontaneously all the objects which we desire, and in sufficient abundance for the desires of all, there would have been no source of dispute or of injury among men; nor would any man have possessed the means of ever acquiring authority over another.

The mere imparting of information is not education.

We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.

Sex acts don't drive erotica, the people who engage in them do.

There is a place of imagination, and it is entirely real.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

I decided to restore 'Napoleon' after a widescreen festival at the Odeon Leicester Square in 1968. It was run by Richard Arnell and George Dunning, who animated and directed 'Yellow Submarine,' and they'd got their hands on the last scene, the triptychs. They just showed that part, without music and with the projectors misaligned.

I lived in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s. It was, for a Westerner, pretty idyllic. There were the religious police; there were the rules; there were the prayer times. But it was as if we were existing in two separate universes. The Westerners were just allowed to get on with their way of life.

We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them.

The First Crusade ... set off on its two-thousand-mile jaunt by massacring Jews, plundering and slaughtering all the way from the Rhine to the Jordan. "In the temple of Solomon," wrote the ecstatic cleric Raimundus de Agiles, "one rode in blood up to the knees and even to the horses" bridles, by the just and marvelous judgment of God.

When the Romans in the last age of the republic came into immediate contact with Iran as a consequence of the occupation of Syria, they found in existence the Persian empire regenerated by the Parthians.

Science is Christian, not when it condemns itself to the letter of things, but when, in the infinitely little, it discovers as many mysteries and as much depth and power as in the infinitely great.

Dante himself is open to the suspicion of partiality: it is said, not without apparent ground, that he puts into hell all the enemies of the political cause, which, in his eyes, was that of Italy and God.

Law is stable; the societies we are speaking of are progressive. The greater or less happiness of a people depends on the degree of promptitude with which the gulf is narrowed.

The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.

Except when war is waged in a desert, noncombatants, also known as civilians or 'the people,' constitute the great majority of those affected.

You do just have to go back to moral philosophy and you've got to say, okay, there is greed, people do want more and more, but then what restrains them and what restrained them in the past was a view of life in which one's satisfaction wasn't the most important thing, that you just, you needed enough and you could say, "Enough is enough." Maybe religion will get you there, maybe just classic moral philosophy, but you have to have some of that, or else you're always on the gravy train.

Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.

In literature and in life we ultimately pursue, not conclusions, but beginnings.

There is not much that even the most socially responsible scientists can do as individuals, or even as a group, about the social consequences of their activities.

Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.

Few Americans realize it, but the United Nations is driving to take control over the Internet. You remember, the folks who want a worldwide income tax and who put Syria and Iran on their Human Rights Committee.

Once you choose to run for president of the United States and succeed, your earlier life, your biography, is a major part of American history.

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposed to rob us of their companionship.

There are laws for peace as well as war.

American Education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will Stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?

The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.

The leader of men in warfare can show himself to his followers only through a mask, a mask that he must make for himself, but a mask made in such form as will mark him to men of his time and place as the leader they want and need.

An apology offered and, equally important, received is a step towards reconciliation and, sometimes, recompense. Without that process, hurts can rankle and fester and erupt into their own hatreds and wrongdoings.

Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; that's what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive.

I really believe that what happens one day affects the next, and I think that came from that experience of learning that if I told the score inning by inning, play by play, it built up to its natural climax.

The rate of technological and human physiological change in the 20th century has been remarkable. Beyond that, a synergy between the improved technology and physiology is more than the simple addition of the two.

The corruption of people is to behave in an inhuman way.

Hitler could not tolerate too much social contact.

The objective of US authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples - not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.

Happiness, whether in business or private life, leaves little trace in history.

If honesty did not exist, we ought to invent it as the best means of getting rich.

I am a conservative. Quite possibly I am on the losing side; often I think so. Yet, out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin.

The children of politicians learn the allure and tricks of politics along with their alphabet. They inherit a network of useful contacts, and - if they're lucky - a name that confers instant voter recognition.

Women's history is women's right-an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long range vision.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

The one certainly for anyone in the path of an avalanche is this: standing still is not an option.

Real women are fat. And thin. And neither. And both. And otherwise.

Japanese naval officers in dress whites are frequent guests at Pearl Harbor's officers' mess and are very polite. They always were. Except, of course, for that little interval there between 1941 and 1945.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.

Universal orthodoxy is enriched by every new discovery of truth: what at first appeared universal, by wishing to stand still, sooner or later becomes a sect.

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.

The power to regulate the value of money does not involve a power to dilute the value of money by inflation, an absurd and self-serving rendering.

Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change.

I think the level of casualties is secondary... [A]ll the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war... What we hate is not casualties but losing.

My father felt that his world of ideas was too liberal for traditional rabbinical teachings, and he looked for a chance to find a way in life.