American Historian Quotes

Mysteries which we have driven outside of the boundaries of our knowledge and which we have located and encompassed, such mysteries will not harm us; on the contrary they will stimulate and inspire us in many ways; the dangerous mysteries are those which are hopelessly mingled with our knowledge, and of which we are perhaps unaware.

Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.

William Irwin Thompson

People you don't like are pigheaded. Your friends are stubborn, or hold to their purpose.

Harry Turtledove

Where character forbids self-indulgence, transcendence still hovers around.

I take great satisfaction in seeing people and organizations achieve goals they might have originally believed to be beyond their reach.

The citizenship of the Negro in this country is a fiction.

Carter G. Woodson

It was an old lesson learned by governments: that war solves problems of control.

There are two elements of Hayek's background that justify our considering him an Austrian economist: first, that he was raised and went to university in Vienna in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and second, that when he finally decided on economics as his field of study, he was trained within the Austrian tradition in economics.

A Systems Esthetic will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-technical conditions rooted only in the present.

Historians are concerned with events which can be assigned to specific timespace locations, events which are (or were) in principle observable or perceivable, whereas imaginative writers – poets, novelists, playwrights – are concerned with both these kinds of events and imagined, hypothetical, or invented ones.

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.

John L. Heilbron

Endless discussions of multiculturalism proceed from the unsubstantiated assumption that numerous distinct cultures constitute American society. Only a few historians or observers even consider the possibility that the opposite may be true: that the world and the United States are relentlessly becoming more culturally uniform, not diverse.

Among Hindu groups, none has made as great an impact on America as the Vedanta Society.

J. Gordon Melton

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

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

I think that in the emergency situations like we have with potentially weapons of mass destruction, the agent in the field needs as much flexibility as he can and the decision of probable cause as to what's going to occur needs to be made not in headquarters and not by the attorney general and not by a special court in Washington, but by the agent in the field who needs to respond immediately.

[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

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