British Historian Quotes

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.

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

Men of much depth of mind can bear a great deal of counsel; for it does not easily deface their own character, nor render their purposes indistinct.

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

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.

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

I still recall, with something of a shock the moment, at the end of the first sitting, when I looked at what had been a lump of clay, and found that a third person was in the room.

On sitting to Elizabeth frink

John Pope-Hennessy

We must expect for a long time yet to see capitalists still striving to obtain the highest possible profits. But observe, that the passion for wealth is certainly in some senses new. It grew up very rapidly at the beginning of the present century; it was not so strong in the last century, when men were much more content to lead a quiet easy life of leisure. The change has really influenced the relations between men; but in the future it is quite possible that the scramble for wealth may grow less intense, and a change in the opposite direction take place.

What thrust us into war were not Hitler's political teachings: the cause, this time, was his successful attempt to establish a new economy. The causes of the war were: envy, greed, and fear.

J. F. C. Fuller

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.

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

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

The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense.

T. J. Clark (art historian)

Since time immemorial it had been the custom before a sea battle for the men to wash and don clean clothes in case of being wounded. This was all the more necessary under these circumstances, as many of them were still covered with coal dust.

My aim is... to place before a young student a nucleus of well-ordered knowledge, to which he is to add intelligent notes and illustrations from his daily reading.

James Gow (scholar)

Garton Ash immersed himself much more deeply and single-mindedly than Ascherson in the politics of Eastern Europe during the final years of the Cold War. The period may have something to do with the difference. As the Eighties unfolded, the East European oppositions to Communism were steadily drawn into the magnetic field of the West's dominant ideology – the uncompromising doctrines of the Right proclaimed by Reagan and Thatcher. For Garton Ash, then an editor and contributor at the Spectator, this was a natural and desirable evolution. For Ascherson, no friend of Thatcherism, it must have posed more difficulties.

The legendary missionary journey of St. Paul, which led to the foundation of the British church, presupposes the existence of a Jewish community - always the initial object of his propaganda - even before the capture of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70.

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.

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

Thomas Hutchinson (governor)

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

As soon as you begin to say We have always done things this way -- perhaps that might be a better way, conscious law-making is beginning. As soon as you begin to say We do things this way -- they do things that way -- what is to be done about it? men are beginning to feel towards justice, that resides between the endless jar of right and wrong.

Aristotle found support for his thesis in facts drawn from geopolitics or 'natural law'. Greek superiority had to be proved demonstrably innate, a gift of nature. In one celebrated fragment he counsels Alexander to be 'a hegemon [leader] of Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants'.

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