20th-century Historian Quotes

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 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.

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
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!

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 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
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.

The human desire to escape the flesh, which took one form in asceticism, might take another form in the creation of machines. Thus, the wish to rise above the bestial body manifested itself not only in angels but in mechanical creatures. Certainly, once machines existed, humans clearly attached to them feelings of escape from the flesh.

As Dr. Chiang puts it, while Buddha came to China on white elephants, Christ was borne on cannon balls.

When the members of the Tizard Mission brought one [magnetron] to America in 1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores. It sparked the whole development of microwave radar and constituted the most important item in reverse Lease-Lend.

How strong is a faith that can't stand up to a few honest questions?

I strode among giants, friends tell me now, though at the time I felt more like a misfit associating with oddballs.

Physics in antiquity remained closely connected with philosophy, and was predominantly concerned with the philosophical category of the "why," rather than the scientific category of the "how."

I believe it is crucial to consider the degree to which one woman's possession of reproductive choice may actually depend on or deepen another woman's reproductive vulnerability.

I suppose that if we in intelligence were one day given three wishes, they would be to know everything, to be believed when we spoke, and in such a way to exercise an influence to the good in the matter of policy.

The assassination at Sarajevo was certainly the crucial precedent of the European war that its conspirators had sought, but was not the historical cause... The assassination acted as a lever, prying the various powers into predictable paths.

The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

Irving Howe
Irving Howe
I think it is important that people be made aware that the vegetarian movement has a venerable history behind it. It didn't spring full-blown from the head of a flower child in the 1960's. It really begins with Pythagoras in the West in the 6th century BC and has reasserted itself periodically ever since.

Rynn Berry
Rynn Berry
The mighty edifice of government science dominated the scene in the middle and twentieth century as a Gothic cathedral dominated a thirteenth century landscape. The work of many hands over the years, it universally inspired admiration, wonder and fear.

In nature's book, everything has its place and its time; there exists a persistent interdependency of its creatures one upon another.

Goodness often blossoms like roses on very rickety trellis-work, and beauty can grow out of nonsense.