20th-century Historian Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming
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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

C. Vann Woodward
C. Vann Woodward
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.

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

Churches which emphasise ecstatic possession by the spirit, which foster prophecy and spiritual healing and exorcism have been seen as continuations of African belief and practice. Yet these very features, which are taken as being most African, are in reality the most Christian aspect of such churches. They spring directly from increasingly strong tendencies in world Christianity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They spring in fact either from anti-establishment Christian Pentecostalism, as it developed in Europe and North America, or from evangelical revivalist tendencies within the major mission churches themselves. Few independent church leaders have claimed to be continuing African traditions.

Early readers assumed the Book of Mormon people ranged up and down North and South America from upstate New York to Chili. A close reading of the text reveals it cannot sustain such an expansive geography.

Contemporary political theorists continue this type of thinking about democracy by arguing that the development of "public judgment" among regular citizens should be made the central concern of modern politics. Public judgment, in the words of Benjamin Barber, is a function of commonality that can be exercised only by citizens interacting with one another in the context of mutual deliberation and decision.

At a time when even the most impoverished and underdeveloped states in the third world enjoy full sovereignty, Ukraine has practically none. This great discrepancy is a historical puzzle, one that calls for an examination of the often overlooked and even more frequently misunderstood past of Ukraine and the Ukrainians.