British Historian Quotes

Eric Hobsbawm

Arnold J. Toynbee

Ernst Gombrich

Bernard Lewis

Saki

A. J. P. Taylor

John Foxe

Leadership is particularly necessary to ensure ready acceptance of the unfamiliar and that which is contrary to tradition.

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future....

The Patriarch Joseph, after agreeing with the Latins that their formula of the Holy Ghost proceeding from the Son meant the same as the Greek formula of the Holy Ghost proceeding through the Son, fell ill and died. An unkind scholar remarked that after muddling his prepositions what else could he decently do?

Steven Runciman

I think sometimes - do not we all? - that perhaps the present year is my last year and that all my busyness is foolish.

Wit is a treacherous dart. It is perhaps the only weapon with which it is possible to stab oneself in one's own back.

The Islamists are the spearhead of current anti-Semitism, aided and abetted by the moral relativism of all too many naïve Western liberals.

Robert S. Wistrich

Meanwhile these islands, stiff with cold and frost, and in a distant region of the world, remote from the visible sun, received the beams of light, that is, the holy precepts of Christ, the true Sun, showing to the whole world his splendor, not only from the temporal firmament, but from the height of heaven, which surpasses every thing temporal, at the latter part, as we know, of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, by whom his religion was propagated without impediment, and death threatened to those who interfered with its professors.

The grain of real knowledge is concealed in a vast deal of esoteric chaff.

Alfred Rupert Hall

The teaching of axioms should come after conveying the theory in a looser version.

Ivor Grattan-Guinness

Men were on earth while climates slowly swung. Fanning wide zones to heat and cold, and long Subsidence turned great continents to sea, And seas dried up, dried up interminably. Age after age; enormous seas were dried Amid wastes of land. And the last monster died.

I think that the way that Ahmadinejad is talking now shows quite clearly his contempt for the Western world in general and the United States in particular. They feel they are dealing with, as Osama bin Laden put it, an effete, degenerate, pampered enemy incapable of real resistance. And they are proceeding on that assumption. Remember that they have no understanding or experience of the free debate of an open society. Where we see free debate and criticism, they see fear, weakness and division; they proceed accordingly, and every day brings new evidence of that from Iran.

Tribute at the funeral of his sister, Princess Diana:

She needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.

Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer

No man, and only one hero, had been called invincible before him, and then only by a poet, but the hero was Heracles, ancestor of the Macedonian kings.

Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave them the impression of military discipline and precision, but as a preparation for a modern war they had no value whatsoever.

A drawing of the nude is a most revealing expression because it is at once the most private and the most personal. Often such drawings are made with no thought of public exhibition. They possess the intimacy of diaries.

The cheerful clatter of Sir James Barrie's cans as he went round with the milk of human kindness.

Philip Guedalla

[Mussolini] forcibly denounced those socialists who thought religion a matter for individual conscience or had their children baptized. Science had proved that God did not exist and the Jesus of history was an ignorant Jew whose family thought him mad, and who was a pigmy compared to the Buddha. Religion, he said, was a disease of the psyche, an epidemic to be cured by psychiatrists, and Christianity in particular was vitiated by preaching the senseless virtues of resignation and cowardice, whereas the new socialist morality should celebrate violence and rebellion.

Denis Mack Smith

We are always looking for metaphors in which to express our ideas of life, for our language is inadequate for all its complexities. Life is a labyrinth... Life is a machine... Life is a laboratory... It is but a metaphor. When we speak of ultimate things we can, maybe, speak only in metaphors. Life is a dance, a very elaborate and complex dance.

The moment that the state came into conflict with the higher power, the moment that it set itself up as an end in itself, it became identified with Augustine's earthly city and lost all claims to a higher sanction than the law of force and self-interest. Without justice, what is a great kingdom but a great robbery, magnum latrocinium?

Christopher Dawson

The Roman Code was merely an enunciation in words of the existing customs of the Roman people.

Henry James Sumner Maine

History is about arrogance, vanity and vapidity—who better than me to present it?

History is a living whole. If one organ be removed, it is nothing but a lifeless mass.

Frederic Harrison

Texas, in the eyes of its inhabitants and in maps supplied to visitors, occupies all of the North American continent but a fraction set aside for the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

Patrick Balfour, 3rd Baron Kinross

The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.

The Truth apprehended by the Subconscious Psyche finds natural expression in Poetry; The Truth apprehended by the Intellect finds natural expression in science..

Arnold J. Toynbee