A Quote by Norman Davies

The historical profession is nowhere famous for its tolerance, but there are not many countries where historians can expect to pay for their opinions with penal servitude or the firing squad.

Norman Davies

Quote Topics

Countries Expect Famous Firing Historians Historical Many Nowhere Opinions Pay Profession Servitude Squad Tolerance

Quote Author

Norman Davies
British - Historian
Born: June 8, 1939

Life is not something to be lived through: it is something to be lived up to. It is a privilege, not a penal servitude of so many decades on earth.

William George Jordan

Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

Michelle Dean

Tolerance obviously requires a non-contentious manner of relating toward one another’s differences. But tolerance does not require abandoning one’s standards or one’s opinions on political or public policy choices. Tolerance is a way of reacting to diversity, not a command to insulate it from examination.

Dallin H. Oaks

Intellectual honesty is the quality that the public in free countries always has expected of historians; much more than that it does not expect, nor often get.

Samuel E. Morison

The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk

The quotes are often poignant or funny (one man before the firing squad requests a bulletproof vest) and often don't register as much more than interesting historical documents from centuries past. But read in aggregate, all that pain piles up. Essentially, Elder has amassed a collection of what people say when they know they are going to die, the final product of what could be seen as psychological torture.

Jonathan Messinger

History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.

Edward M. Lerner

There are three foundational issues or three divisions that I should say that Sharia fits into, one is penal law of course and that is what gets all the attention, there's two countries in the world right now that actually have a Federal mandate to enact penal law according to the Sharia, that's Saudi Arabia, and Iran.

Mark Durie

Because Utah is largely Mormon country, the firing squad's a little different. You're blindfolded but no cigarette.

David Letterman

Now in Utah if you get the death sentence, they have the firing squad. In Russia, they call that early retirement.

David Letterman

I ain't expect it. I just expected to be Chicago famous - 'hood famous. I ain't expect to be outside-of-Chicago famous.

Lil Durk

Those who are unprepared to demonstrate tolerance cannot expect or even demand tolerance for themselves.

Walter Kasper

I have zero tolerance for people who don't come completely prepared. I expect contribution, I expect attendance, and I expect directors to take trips and visit the company's programs.

Anne M. Mulcahy

In aesthetic consciousness we enter that painless state, prized by Epicurus as the state of the gods; for a moment we are delivered from the miserable pressure of the will. We celebrate the Sabbath from the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still.