20th-century Historian Quotes

Memorial services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set.

On the secret to a perfect exhibition:
You've got to have two out of death, sex and jewels.

It is not love, or morality, or international law that determines the outcome of world affairs, but the changing distribution of organized force

William Woodruff
William Woodruff
It is only too clear that man is not at home in this universe, and yet he is not good enough to deserve a better.

Like the high whine of the dentist's drill, the low rumble of the footnote on the historian's page reassures.

To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won… it was unheard of, but that is exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.

Of Rab Butler:
He seemed like a benign and decent beached whale washed up on the harder shores of modern Conservatism.

Peter Hennessy
Peter Hennessy
The computer is no better than its program.

This museum is a torpedo moving through time, its head the ever-advancing present, its tail the ever-receding past of 50 to 100 years ago.

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

The love of power and the power to attract love were not easy to reconcile.

Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface. The photograph is thus a type of icon, or visual likeness, which bears an indexical relationship to its object.

Kuhn's revolution was not yet a Kuhnian revolution, although he dated his intention to write the book that became Structure to the time of his wrestle with Aristotle. What he needed was a historical exemplar. He found it in the Copernican revolution.

War has been more common than peace, and extended periods of peace have been rare in a world divided into multiple states

The day of the jewelled epigram is past and, whether one likes it or not, one is moving into the stern puritanical era of the four-letter word.

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

Texas, in the eyes of its inhabitants and in maps supplied to visitors, occupies all of the North American continent but a fraction set aside for the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Four hundred years is but a moment in 10,000 years. Time is curved, time is braided. Throw out your clocks.

I knew a mathematician who said, "I do not know as much as God. But I know as much as God knew at my age."

Even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich.

Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.

Eric Williams
Eric Williams
Truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners, and enemies.

Taylor Branch
Taylor Branch
It can be said unequivocally that good teaching is far more complex, difficult, and demanding than mediocre research, which may explain why professors try so hard to avoid it.

Delusion about history is a serious matter; it can gravely affect the history that is waiting to be made.

The greatest Marxist writer of the twentieth century, paradoxically, is also one of the greatest examples of the independence of the human spirit from its material limitations.