American Historian Quotes

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

The Soviet Union and something called communism per se had not been the object of Washington's global attacks. There had never been an International Communist Conspiracy. The enemy was, and remains, any government or movement, or even individual, that stands in the way of the expansion of the American Empire; by whatever name the US gives to the enemy - communist, rogue state, drug trafficker, terrorist.

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

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.

The Bible is a window in this prison-world, through which we may look into eternity.

Timothy Dwight IV

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

Joel Augustus Rogers

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

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

When he [the coyote] starts to move, it is with some deliberation. He prefers a dog-trot and often several shots from your rifle will not stir him into a run. He slips along easily and gracefully - a lean, hungrylooking wretch with all the insolence of a hoodlum and all the shrewdness of a thief.

John Charles Van Dyke

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

The state of Israel is a project of Jewish nationalism that is as legitimate as any other national project. But Israel as a state is not perfect and cannot be above criticism in democratic societies, including practical criticism.

The only thing workers have to bargain with is their skill or their labor. Denied the right to withhold it as a last resort, they become powerless. The strike is therefore not a breakdown of collective bargaining-it is the indispensable cornerstone of that process.

Paul Clark (educator)

I'm looking for what the artist is trying to say and what he or she is actually saying, what the work reveals about society and the timeless conditions of being alive.

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.

A. Hunter Dupree

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

The world changed while I slept, and much to my surprise, no one had consulted me.

And last, we must bear in mind that the relationships between perception, thought, emotion, and behavior are neither automatic nor consistent. In many cases they are demonstrably affected or directed by culture and socialization. We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.

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

Howard K. Beale

Slavery as an institution that degraded man to a thing has never died out. In some periods of history it has flourished: many civilizations have climbed to power and glory on the backs of slaves. In other times slaves have dwindled in number and economic importance. But never has slavery disappeared.

Tact is not only kindness, but kindness skillfully extended.

James G. Randall

There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution.

Louis Leo Snyder

We may sense that the river of black struggle is people, but it is also the hope, the movement, the transformative power that humans create and that create them, us, and makes them, us, new persons.

Vincent Harding

The second law, Rakove's law of principle and politics, states that the citizen is influenced by principle in direct proportion to his distance from the political situation.

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

It may well be that men of science, not kings, or warriors, or even statesmen are to be the heroes of the future.

Charles A. Beard