British Historian Quotes

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

When I meet a historian who cannot think that there have been great men, great men moreover in politics, I feel myself in the presence of a bad historian, and there are times when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill — whether they can see that, no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of man and career become known, he still remains quite simply, a great man.

Many historians make it a principal part of their business to investigate and explain the unfamiliar beliefs we encounter in past societies. But what is the relationship between our provision of such explanations and our assessment of the truth of such beliefs? The question is obviously a highly intractable one, but no practising historian can hope to evade it, as many philosophers have recently and rightly pointed out.

Quentin Skinner

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

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.

Many of the political jokes that circulated in the Third Reich were directed at Goering. He collected them [all] in a large leather notebook and delighted in re-telling most of them to his friends.

It's no use growing older if you only learn new ways of misbehaving yourself.

Many are called but few are chosen. There are sayings of Christ which suggest that the Church he came to establish will always be a minority affair.

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

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....

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.

[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

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

Philip Guedalla

Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell.

I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.

Isaac Deutscher

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

I told him his nerves were affected: Every molehill was a mountain.

Thomas Hutchinson (governor)

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

Frederic Harrison

Democracies that are under threat of destruction face the impossible dilemma of either yielding to that threat by insisting on preserving the democratic niceties, or violating their own principles by curtailing democratic rights.

Richard J. Evans

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.

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

Ivor Grattan-Guinness

When I write I have no loyalty except to historical truth as I see it and care no more about British achievements and mistakes than any other.

A. J. P. Taylor

The military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of its totality.

Such is the past career, present condition, and certain future of the Middle American. There are as many above him as below him, and especially as many below him as above him.

Is not all science a gnosis, an insight into the nature of the All, which proceeds by successive revelations?