20th-century Historian Quotes

Barry was one of the first to see that mass and volume in sculpture were not dependent upon visibility... But also, and perhaps more importantly, that language was a necessary component to communicate the idea in conceptual art.

Robert C. Morgan

Sunni and Shia are the main schools in Islam, like Protestant and Catholic. … When you debate with the other school you don't use vile language or other terms against their respective leaders.

Ammar Nakshawani

Roy Ascott was among the first artists to launch an appeal for total spectator participation: for him, the strict antinomy between action and contemplation needed to be abolished.

Part of the power of Emerson's individualism is his insistence, at crucial moments, that individualism does not mean isolation or self-sufficiency. This is not a paradox, for it is only the strong individual who can frankly concede the sometimes surprising extent of his own dependence.

Robert D. Richardson

If we look at the parpens piled up on the building site or at the block of bronze, nothing about them manifests that they are suited to being a house or a statue.... Aristotle speaks of the materials considered as such in terms of "the buildable" (I, 201a 16, b Bf), coining an adjective whose suffix expresses capacity (what he calls dunamis). This capacity, as we have seen, cannot be grasped after the manner of that with which perception provides us (color, hardness, etc.); it requires a gaze capable of probing more deeply, of proceeding from the real to the possible—as when Michelangelo "sees" a David in the formless block abandoned by other sculptors.

[Yahoo!] found the way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse.

Jason Scott Sadofsky

In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer or the programmatic music compositions of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis transposed systems theory from the sciences to the arts. By the 1960s, artists as diverse as Roy Ascott, Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Sonia Sheridan, and Stephen Willats were breaking with accepted aesthetics to embrace open systems that emphasized organism over mechanism, dynamic processes of interaction among elements, and the observer's role as an inextricable part of the system. Jack Burnham's 1968 Artforum essay Systems Aesthetics and his 1970 Software exhibition marked the high point of systems-based art until its resurgence in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century.

Edward A. Shanken

Many historians make it a principal part of their business to investigate and explain the unfamiliar beliefs we encounter in past societies. But what is the relationship between our provision of such explanations and our assessment of the truth of such beliefs? The question is obviously a highly intractable one, but no practising historian can hope to evade it, as many philosophers have recently and rightly pointed out.

Quentin Skinner

When Time magazine conducted a poll in Europe in March [2003] asking which of three - North Korea, Iraq, or the United States - was the biggest threat to world peace, a whopping 86.9% answered the United States.

Immanuel Wallerstein

Wine is the liquid form of the Goddess Tara, who is the saviour of all living creatures, the mother of all enjoyment and Release, the destroyer of dangers and disease, who burns up all sins and purifies the worlds, O Beloved, who grants all success and increases knowledge, understanding and learning.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty

Management as an activity has always existed to make people's desires through organized effort. Management facilitates the efforts of people in organized groups and arises when people seek to cooperate to achieve goals.

People are always asking about the good old days. I say, why don't you say the good now days?

Robert Maxwell Young

Effective coordination of throughput required the placing of vigorous management controls over these despots.

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

The writings of all great men stand as a perpetual challenge to each succeeding generation which attempts to make an interpretation suitable to its own age.

I. Bernard Cohen

The creation of Modern France through expansion goes back to the establishment of a small kingdom in the area around Paris in the late tenth century and was not completed until the incorporation of Nice and Savoy in 1860. The existing "hexagon" was the result of a long series of wars and conquests involving the triumph of French language and culture over what once were autonomous and culturally distinctive communities. The assimilation of Gascons, Savoyards, Occitans, Basques, and others helped to sustain the myth that French overseas expansionism in the nineteenth century, especially to North and West Africa, was a continuation of the same assimilationist project.

George M. Fredrickson

Tsai's Multi-kinetics were dynamically integrated multiple constructions, employing thirty-two kinetic units, each of which contains a configuration of multi-colored gyroscopic forms. With these elements he created an active environmental field that could, apparently, be infinitely extended. Each motorized unit was a self-sufficient entity, and when it was combined with other similar units produced a large-scale kinetic work that joined visual intensity with mechanical power. By controlling the time sequence of each unit in skillful compositions, Tsai used engineering principles to achieve aesthetic ends.

Knowing the past is as astonishing a performance as knowing the stars.

For Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such. The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem.

Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.

Wallace Stegner

Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay.

Robert Conquest

Everyone is acquainted with dogs and horses, since they are seen daily. To reproduce their likeness is very difficult. On the other hand, since demons and spiritual beings have no definite form, and no one has ever seen them, they are easy to execute.

Chomsky just has not entered deeply into what he is talking about and he is not greatly interested in anything except digging out material for anti-American invective.

Adrian Hastings

From the point of view of our discussion, the book as a response to political and literary circumstances, its origin belongs to the autumn and winter of 1678-80, exactly a decade earlier than it is traditionally supposed to have been written. Two Treatises is an Exclusion Tract, not a Revolution Pamphlet.

Medicine is a notoriously messy mix of laboratory research and clinical crisis, the itch for knowledge and the need to act. Different experts contribute diverse skills, and the whole has been likened to a jigsaw [puzzle] being pieced together by total strangers, each of whom is only guessing at the picture.

All creative work has its greatest reality while it is still in a man's mind, before he begins to execute it.