American Historian Quotes

We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America that we created.

But before and after the Mongol upheaval, the Khazars sent many offshoots into the unsubdued Slavonic lands, helping ultimately to build up the great Jewish centers of eastern Europe.

Salo Wittmayer Baron

The most important fact about American liberty is that it has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with one another. This diversity of libertarian ideas has created a culture of freedom which is more open and expansive than any unitary tradition alone could possibly be.

David Hackett Fischer

Apologizing for our past sins may reveal character and for a time lessen anti-Americanism abroad, but if it is done without acknowledging that the sins of America are the sins of mankind, and that our remedies are so often exceptional, then it only earns transitory applause—and a more lasting contempt that we ourselves do not believe in the values we profess.

Victor Davis Hanson

Teaching is too vital an occupation to be left to the lazy or greedy or negative

Eliot Wigginton

The world has produced about 1 trillion barrels of oil since the start of the industry in the nineteenth century. Currently, it is thought that there are at least 5 trillion barrels of petroleum resources, of which 1.4 trillion is sufficiently developed and technically and economically accessible.

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

Most Blacks had supported the courageous struggles of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) against both school inequality and school segregation. The demise of their schools and the inequitable burdens of school desegregation, however, raised new doubts. There emerged a notable continuity between older, more conservative African American voices, which had given the building of strong Black schools priority over desegregation, and the newer "militant" expressions of Black separatism and community control.

David S. Cecelski

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.

The intrusion of history is not just theoretical. It is also the legacy of being an accomplice or a victim, or just an onlooker. In each case, history entails the uncomfortable presence of earlier unresolved roles.

Charles S. Maier

Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.

The entire banking movement, at all crucial stages, was centralized in the hands of a few men who for years were linked, ideologically and personally, with one another.

'Good wine needs no bush', and if there were need to urge the reading of history it would be proof that history is too dull and unattractive to be read.

Albert Bushnell Hart

Food, medicine, beauty, and love. When we talk about them in English,
they seem so different from each other. But looking at them from
another perspective, they are not so different. Good food is a part of
good health. Good health leads to good looks. Love surrounds it all.
When we feed or heal, we share love. When we love and are loved, we
are beautiful.

Alma Hogan Snell

Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.

The Net is the ultimate empowerment tool. You have the right to express your opinion to a global audience, but everyone has the right not to pay any attention to it.

The Jews emerge into history, not a nation of keen spiritual aspirations and altruistic ethics, but that pagan people, worshipping rocks, sheep and cattle, and spirits of caves and wells, of whom the Old Testament, tending towards its higher ideal, gives fragmentary but convincing evidence.

James T. Shotwell

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.

War has been more common than peace, and extended periods of peace have been rare in a world divided into multiple states

We're bound to learn from the past whether or not we make the effort, since it's the only data base we have...

John Lewis Gaddis

The love of power and the power to attract love were not easy to reconcile.

Robert K. Massie

It is an old trick. The playgoer who does not like dirty plays is denounced as a prude; the music-lover who resents cacophony is told he is a pedant; and in all these matters the final crushing blow administered to the man of discrimination is the ascription to him of a hidebound prejudice against things that are new because they are new.

Royal Cortissoz

During my tenure at the Endowment, I often found that those who did us the most damage did so under the justification of helping us by 'preventing worse language.' In the military it would be called friendly fire. One ends up just as dead.

John Frohnmayer

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.

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

David Brion Davis