20th-century Historian Quotes

Is not all science a gnosis, an insight into the nature of the All, which proceeds by successive revelations?

Frances Yates
Frances Yates
In our time it has become all too easy to regard science as a vast impersonal force — a kind of Frankenstein's monster that, escaping human control, has forcibly seized us and carries us at terrifying speeds in directions we have not chosen towards ends unknown.

In the luxuriance of a bowl of grapes set out in ritual display, in a bottle of wine, the soil and sunshine of California reached millions for whom that distant place would henceforth be envisioned as a sun-graced land resplendent with the goodness of the fruitful earth.

Kevin Starr
Kevin Starr
On the earthquakes in Haiti:
Every corpse is mine; everybody is mine. Their spirit fuses with mine and that of all Haitians. Spirits live beyond death—and before birth. The dead are not dead, but alive in new dimensions.

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.

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

For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

Eric Foner
Eric Foner
Critical thinking, in short, offers the way to keep science and technology in harness.

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

Implicit in the stare of those eyes, the power of those knobbly hands, was labor's historic threat of violence against capital.

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.

History is Janus-faced, but the faces are far from being identical.

Some commentators have drawn such a stark and gloomy picture of the Weimar Republic's early difficulties that the Republic seems foredoomed to failure from the outset... The conditions in which Weimar democracy were born were certainly not such as to help it flourish; and as it unfolded, it was clearly saddled with a burden of problems, in a range of areas.

Objectivity in science cannot be proclaimed, it must be built.

Londa Schiebinger
Londa Schiebinger
War challenges virtually every other institution of society - the justice and equity of its economy, the adequacy of its political systems, the energy of its productive plant, the bases, wisdom and purposes of its foreign policy.

Certainty creates strength. Certainty gives one something upon which to learn. Uncertainty creates weakness. Uncertainty makes one tentative if not fearful, and tentative steps, even when in the right direction, may not overcome significant obstacles.

It has often been said that modern nursing could not have developed independently of modern medicine, but... modern medicine could not have developed without the emergence of modern nursing.

Style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and a meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist andthe broad outlook of a group are visible,... communicating and fixing certain values of religious, social, and moral life through the emotional suggestiveness of forms. It is, besides, a common ground against which innovations and individuality of particular works may be measured.

The Islamists are the spearhead of current anti-Semitism, aided and abetted by the moral relativism of all too many naïve Western liberals.

Until women can visualize the sacred female they cannot be whole and society cannot be whole.

Come, little lad; come, little lass, Your docile creed recite: "We know that Energy equals Mass By the Square of the Speed of Light."