20th-century Historian Quotes

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Eric Hobsbawm

Howard Zinn

Ernst Gombrich

Ryszard Kapuściński

Bernard Lewis

A. J. P. Taylor

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

Among Hindu groups, none has made as great an impact on America as the Vedanta Society.

J. Gordon Melton

To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.

Food, medicine, beauty, and love. When we talk about them in English,
they seem so different from each other. But looking at them from
another perspective, they are not so different. Good food is a part of
good health. Good health leads to good looks. Love surrounds it all.
When we feed or heal, we share love. When we love and are loved, we
are beautiful.

Alma Hogan Snell

The twilight zone that lies between living memory and written history is one of the favorite breeding places of mythology.

C. Vann Woodward

I don't think books can change the world, but when the world begins to change, it searches for different books.

These problems have been here so long that the only way I've been able to function at all is by learning to ignore them. Else I would be in a constant state of panic, unable to think or act constructively.

As an aesthetic surgeon, one simply knows a difficult or dangerous or unhappy patient when one sees one. This learned response to the difficult patient places the surgeon in the position of the psychiatrist. The history of aesthetic surgery runs remarkably parallel to that of psychoanalysis as well as psychosomatic medicine.

The grain of real knowledge is concealed in a vast deal of esoteric chaff.

Alfred Rupert Hall

We all know what feminists are. They are shrill, overly aggressive, man-hating, ball-busting, selfish, hairy, extremist, deliberately unattractive women with absolutely no sense of humor who see sexism at every turn. They make men's testicles shrivel up to the size of peas, they detest the family and think all children should be deported or drowned.

Susan J. Douglas

It is clear that history differs from the other disciplines in having
an approach and not an area of its own.

Leonard Krieger

Anyone who is going to make anything out of history will, sooner or later, have to do most of the work himself. He will have to read, and consider, and reconsider, and then read some more.

Geoffrey Barraclough

The ideas of theologians are refuted by their adversaries, the ideas of scientists are refuted by their followers.

The peoples of Europe are a work in progress and always must be... The history of the people of Europe has not ended — it never will. Ethnogenesis is a process of the present and future as much as it is the past. No efforts of romantics, politicians, or social scientists can preserve once and for all some essential soul of a people or nation. Nor can any effort ensure that nations, ethnic groups, and communities of today will not vanish utterly in the future. The past may have set the parameters within which one can build the future, but it cannot determine what that future must be.

Patrick J. Geary

The second law, Rakove's law of principle and politics, states that the citizen is influenced by principle in direct proportion to his distance from the political situation.

It is a form of generational narcissism to change texts to suit one's own needs.

Luke Timothy Johnson

If Veblen failed to develop an evolutionary methodology, he also failed to develop a comprehensive evolutionary theory to explain in detail how institutions evolve in the cultural environment and what sorts of interaction occur between economic activity and institutional structures. Veblen was something of an intellectual butterfly, and he often lacked the patience to elaborate his ideas into a coherent system. But he teemed with fragmentary insights, and these can be pieced together to suggest the outlines of a Veblenian scheme of cultural evolution - what might be called a 'pre-theory' of cultural change.

Cynthia Eagle Russett

Women owe Friedan an incalculable debt for The Feminine Mystique. Domesticity was not a satisfactory story of an intelligent woman's life.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

The Communists claim that they liberated the Russian people. Yet, when the Great Patriotic War began, these same Russians greeted their foreign invaders with tears, with flowers and with enthusiastic hospitality. What can have brought them to the point at which they would greet even Hitler as their saviour and liberator?

Actors yearn for the perfect director, athletes for the perfect coach, priests for the perfect pope, presidents for the perfect historian. Writers hunger for the perfect reviewer.

Leaders are indispensable, but to produce a major social change many ordinary people must also be involved.

Anne Firor Scott

The goal is not to sail the boat, but rather to help the boat sail herself.

John Rousmaniere

Life and study have persuaded me of the openness of history. There is no inevitability in history. Thinking about what might have happened, what could have happened, is a necessary element in trying to understand what did happen. And if, as I believe, individual acts of decency and courage make a difference, then they need to be recorded and remembered.

We need open minds and open hearts when we wrestle with the past and ask questions of it, and the answers it will provide are in nobody's pocket... We should let nobody tell us that they know all that it contains, or try to prescribe or constrain in advance what it has to tell us.

He soon made his name as a distinctly awkward fast left-arm bowler whose pounding run to the wicket was filled with menace.