American Historian Quotes

Give me a well-cooked, well-served meal, a bouquet, and a sunset, and I can do more for a man's soul than all the cant ever preached. I can even do it without a sunset!

Like the high whine of the dentist's drill, the low rumble of the footnote on the historian's page reassures.

Without will, without individuals, there are no heroes. But neither are there villains. And the absence of villains is as prostrating, as soul-destroying, as the absence of heroes.

Europeans not only colonized most of the world, they colonized information about the world.

An androgynous mind was not a male mind. It was a mind attuned to the full range of human experience, including the invisible lives of women.

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

Constance Rourke
Constance Rourke
Those who sit at the feast will continue to enjoy themselves even though the veil that separates them from the world of toiling reality below has been lifted by mass revolts and critics.

Mary Ritter Beard
Mary Ritter Beard
Tact is not only kindness, but kindness skillfully extended.

I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life -- a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it -- filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction.

There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution.

His mind had one compartment for right and one for wrong, but no middle chamber where the two could commingle.

An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces.

Resentment is like taking poison and hoping it'll kill someone else.

A successful revolution begins to develop a stake in the status quo.

Actors yearn for the perfect director, athletes for the perfect coach, priests for the perfect pope, presidents for the perfect historian. Writers hunger for the perfect reviewer.

Thomas Fleming
Thomas Fleming
Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining and constructive companions through your whole life.

David McCullough
David McCullough
As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

Iris Chang
Iris Chang
Jesus Christ rose from the grave.' With this proclamation, the Christian church began. This may be the fundamental element of Christian faith; certainly it is the most radical.

When it comes to the cause of justice, I take no prisoners and I don't believe in compromising.

Never, in these United States, has the brain of man conceived, or the hand of man fashioned, so perfect a thing as a clipper ship.

Samuel Eliot Morison
Samuel Eliot Morison
The computer is no better than its program.

The twilight zone that lies between living memory and written history is one of the favorite breeding places of mythology.

C. Vann Woodward
C. Vann Woodward
Unlike most readers in Antiquity who read their books aloud, we have developed the convention of reading silently. This lets us read more widely but often less well, especially when what we are reading-such as the plays of Shakespeare and Holy Scripture-is a body of oral material that has been, almost but not quite accidentally, captured in a book like a fly in amber.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Jaroslav Pelikan
The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
Some friendships in life sustain themselves only at a particular life stage, products of some mutual developmental problem to be resolved together, or of some external circumstance, like being housed in the same dormitory in boarding school. Others grow out of a deeper spiritual and philosophical affinity, which continues throughout life.