20th-century Historian Quotes

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.

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."

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.

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
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.

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

Frances Yates
Frances Yates
Although it is tempting to imagine an ancient era innocent of biochemical weaponry, in fact this Pandora's box of horrors was opened thousands of years ago. The history of making war with biological weapons begins in mythology, in ancient oral traditions that preserved records of actual events and ideas of the era before the invention of written histories.

Adrienne Mayor
Adrienne Mayor
This being 1962, no one thought it odd to have a mime program on radio.

What good deed can government do for religion? The best deed of all: leave it free and unencumbered, burdened by neither enmity nor amity.

If it were true that Christianity and science were incompatible, there would be no Christians who were respected scientists. If fact, about forty percent of professional natural scientists are practicing Christians, and many others are theists of other kinds. Fewer than thirty percent are atheists.

There are jus times when you can't let the right thing stand in yo way.

A drawing of the nude is a most revealing expression because it is at once the most private and the most personal. Often such drawings are made with no thought of public exhibition. They possess the intimacy of diaries.

The history of the United States is the story of people of many backgrounds.

The acceptability of birth control has always depended on a morality that separates sex from reproduction. In the nineteenth century, when the birth control movement began, such a separation was widely considered immoral. The eventual widespread public acceptance of birth control required a major reorientation of sexual values.

To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of 'pushing paint,' breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing.

The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense.

Pretending that the world's religions are the same does not make our world safer. Like all forms of ignorance, it makes our world more dangerous. What we need on this furiously religious planet is a realistic view of where religious rivals clash and where they can cooperate.

The purpose of totalitarian parties, for which Bolshevism provided the model, was not to become the government, but to manipulate the government from behind the scenes.

Richard Pipes
Richard Pipes
The renewals of the subjective approach to nature make a pathetic theme. Its ruins lie strewn like good intentions all along the ground traversed by science, until it survives only in strange corners like Lysenkoism [doctrine centered on belief in acquired characteristics] and anthroposophy, where nature is socialized or moralized.

The combination of professionalism and technology may also result in narrow-minded specialization more suited to a debating society than to an organization whose task it is to cope with, and indeed live in, the dangerous and uncertain environment of war.

What could be more general than 2, which can represent two galaxies or two pickles, or one galaxy plus one pickle (the mind doth boggle), or just 2 gently bobbing - where? It, like God, is an I am and many have thought that it must be a precipitate of ultimate reality.

What is the Vienna Circle? is a question which is neither rhetorical nor trivial. It is perhaps an attempt to 'square the circle' – which is, meanwhile, mathematically possible, as Karl Menger described as early as 1934.

Friedrich Stadler
Friedrich Stadler
In its use of words poetry is just the reverse of science. Very definite thoughts do occur, but not because the words are so chosen as logically to bar out all possibilities save one.

It was never any different. It has been the same since 1619. That was when the first ships arrived from West Africa with blacks on them. We got off to a bad start right then!

Economists have traditionally been leery at mentalités as a factor in long-term economic development. In the budding literature on the economic rise of the West, such factors have been ignored or curtly dismissed. In the past, economists' hostility to religious factors stems from the incompleteness of such theories. Attitudes were a matter of degree, not of absolutes.

Joel Mokyr
Joel Mokyr