American Historian Quotes

Nationalism is a state of mind permeating the large majority of the people and claiming to permeate all its members; it recognises the nation-State as the ideal form of political organization and the nationality as the source of all creative cultural energy and economic well-being. The supreme loyalty of man is therefore due to his nationality, as his own life is supposedly rooted in and made possible by its welfare.

It is clear that history differs from the other disciplines in having
an approach and not an area of its own.

Leonard Krieger

It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things is approximate to their real value....

Ananda Coomaraswamy

Is Christianity just another special-interest group, clawing for political power? Or, even if Christians are acting as God's spokesmen, must Christians always conduct themselves politically as if Christianity were just another special-interest group? Do Christians conduct evangelism this way?.

Gary North (economist)

We are all Danes now. We are all Jews now. We are all Pope Benedict.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

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

Kenneth C. Davis

Since what unnumbered year
Hast thou kept watch and ward
And o'er the buried Land of Fear
So grimly held thy guard?

Henry Howard Brownell

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.

Charles Coulston Gillispie

The boldness of his mind was sheathed in a scabbard of politeness.

There is nothing so disturbing to one's well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich

Charles P. Kindleberger

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

Theodore H. White

The conventional model for explaining the uniqueness of American democracy is its division between executive, legislative, and judicial functions. It was the great contribution of Frank J. Goodnow to codify a less obvious, but no less profound element: the distinction between politics and policies, principles and operations. He showed how the United States went beyond a nation based on government by gentlemen and then one based on the spoils system brought about by the Jacksonian revolt against the Eastern Establishment, into a government that separated political officials from civil administrators.

Frank Johnson Goodnow

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

Harry Turtledove

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.

On Yahoo! pulling the plug on GeoCities:

[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

One of the world's greatest needs has ever been unboastful, unbiased history.

Joel Augustus Rogers

Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook.

Originality is what distinguishes art from craft. It is the yardstick of artistic greatness.

The trouble you're expecting never happens; it's always something that sneaks up the other way.

George R. Stewart

The reality is that our economy now consists of driving 250 million vehicles around the suburbs and malls and eating fried chicken. We don't manufacture much. We just burn up ever scarcer petroleum in the ever-expanding suburbs built with mortgage money lent to people who haven't a clue.

Mothers have as powerful an influence over the welfare of future generations as all other earthly causes combined.

John Stevens Cabot Abbott

The peoples of Europe are a work in progress and always must be... The history of the people of Europe has not ended — it never will. Ethnogenesis is a process of the present and future as much as it is the past. No efforts of romantics, politicians, or social scientists can preserve once and for all some essential soul of a people or nation. Nor can any effort ensure that nations, ethnic groups, and communities of today will not vanish utterly in the future. The past may have set the parameters within which one can build the future, but it cannot determine what that future must be.

Patrick J. Geary

We must face the ultimate contradiction that our free and democratic society was made possible by massive slave labor.

David Brion Davis

Tact is not only kindness, but kindness skillfully extended.

James G. Randall

The American dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.

James Truslow Adams