19th-century Historian Quotes

H. G. Wells

Jules Michelet

Pierre de Coubertin

Alexis de Tocqueville

Arnold J. Toynbee

Henri Pirenne

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Wilson was a visionary who liked to identify himself with "forward-looking man"; Harding … was as old-fashioned as those wooden Indians which used to stand in front of cigar stores.... Wilson thought in terms of the whole world; Harding was for America first. And, finally, whereas Wilson wanted America to exert itself nobly, Harding wanted to give it a rest.

Frederick Lewis Allen

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It only wants to show what actually happened.

Leopold von Ranke

In all parts of the Old World, as well as of the New, it was evident that Columbus had kindled a fire in every mariner's heart. That fire was the harbinger of a new era, for it was not to be extinguished.

Charles Kendall Adams

Leadership is particularly necessary to ensure ready acceptance of the unfamiliar and that which is contrary to tradition.

Individual ambition is undoubtedly a strong motive in student work, but there is such a thing among students everywhere as ambition for others, call it class spirit, esprit de corps, good fellowship, or good will to men.

Herbert Baxter Adams

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

The American dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.

James Truslow Adams

As for rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian rock.

The introduction of the Christian religion into the world has produced an incalculable change in history. There had previously been only a history of nations — there is now a history of mankind; and the idea of an education of human nature as a whole, — an education the work of Jesus Christ Himself — is become like a compass for the historian, the key of history, and the hope of nations.

Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné

In 1688 England contracted to the Netherlands the highest debt that one nation can owe to another. Herself not knowing how to recover her liberties, they were restored by men of the United Provinces.

George Bancroft

It may well be that men of science, not kings, or warriors, or even statesmen are to be the heroes of the future.

Charles A. Beard

No class of Americans, so far as I know, has ever objected... to any amount of governmental meddling if it appeared to benefit that particular class.

The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.

Bernard Berenson

The procession from Newgate to Tyburn used to pass along Broad Street, and halt at the great gate of the hospital, in order that the condemned man might take his last draught of ale on earth.

Since what unnumbered year
Hast thou kept watch and ward
And o'er the buried Land of Fear
So grimly held thy guard?

Henry Howard Brownell

The ideal of progress, freedom of thought, and the decline of ecclesiastical power go together.

Talk ought always to run obliquely, not nose to nose with no chance of mental escape.

Frank Moore Colby

The tolerant man has decided opinions, but recognises the process by which he reaches them, and keeps before himself the truth that they can only be profitably spread by repeating in the case of others a similar process to that through which he passed himself. He always keeps in view the hope of spreading his own opinions, but he endeavours to do so by producing conviction. He is virtuous, not because he puts his own opinions out of sight, nor because he thinks that other opinions are as good as his own, but because his opinions are so real to him that he would not anyone else hold them with less reality

Mandell Creighton

Olympism is not a system - it is a state of mind. This state of mind has emerged from a double cult: that of effort and that of Eurythmy - a taste of excess and a taste of measure combined.

Pierre de Coubertin

Strabo, traveling in North Africa … [did not find] its women in the army but found that they ruled the country politically, while the men were still without significance in the state, occupying themselves largely with body care and hair-do, greedy for golden jewelry with which to bedeck themselves. The Berbers of our times....[,] near the Atlas Mountains, … have preserved a strong gynocracy. In some Tuareg tribes, the women perpetuate the old culture and know Old Libyan writing and literature. Their men wear veils and remain illiterates.

What thrust us into war were not Hitler's political teachings: the cause, this time, was his successful attempt to establish a new economy. The causes of the war were: envy, greed, and fear.

J. F. C. Fuller

The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers.

Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.

Do I believe in ghosts?...I am prepared to consider evidence and accept it if it satisfies me.

Science has not closed, and will never close the soul's east window of divine surprise.