British Historian Quotes

Nature, even if we hesitate to call it good, is infinitely interesting, infinitely beautiful.

By pagans the Jews (and later Christians) were seen as perverse, almost indeed as atheists, for they denied the very existence of other gods.

Adrian Goldsworthy

For if we merely take what obviously appears the line of least resistance, its obviousness will appeal to the opponent also; and this line may no longer be that of least resistance. In studying the physical aspect, we must never lose sight of the psychological, and only when both are combined is the strategy truly an indirect approach, calculated to dislocate the opponent's balance.

Basil Liddell Hart

This filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts.

In one sphere above all others, Anne Boleyn still had the power to influence him, and that was in the case of church reform. Anne was a passionate and sincere evangelical, the owner of a library of controversial reformist literature, and she was sympathetic to radical and even Lutheran ideas.

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

The habit of a midwinter festivity had come by the dawn of history (and probably very long before) to seem a natural one to the British, and not one to be eradicated by changes of political or religious fashion.... It was general custom in pagan Europe to decorate spaces with greenery and flowers for festivals, attested wherever records have survived.

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

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

Thomas Hutchinson (governor)

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

Since the earliest times it is as the exploiter that the Jew has been known amongst his fellow men of all races and creeds. Moreover, he has persistently shown himself ungrateful... The Jews have always formed a rebellious element in every state.

Nesta Helen Webster

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

Stalin was formed by much more than a miserable childhood, just as the USSR was formed by much more than Marxist ideology.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

History is Janus-faced, but the faces are far from being identical.

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)

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

Alfred Rupert Hall

Anyone who is going to make anything out of history will, sooner or later, have to do most of the work himself. He will have to read, and consider, and reconsider, and then read some more.

Geoffrey Barraclough

The withered primrose by the mourning river,
The faded summer's sun from weeping fountains,
The light-blown bubble vanished for ever,
The molten snow upon the naked mountains,
Are emblems that the treasures we up-lay
Soon wither, vanish, fade, and melt away.

Memorial services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set.

On the secret to a perfect exhibition:

You've got to have two out of death, sex and jewels.

It is not love, or morality, or international law that determines the outcome of world affairs, but the changing distribution of organized force

William Woodruff

Some commentators have drawn such a stark and gloomy picture of the Weimar Republic's early difficulties that the Republic seems foredoomed to failure from the outset... The conditions in which Weimar democracy were born were certainly not such as to help it flourish; and as it unfolded, it was clearly saddled with a burden of problems, in a range of areas.

In its use of words poetry is just the reverse of science. Very definite thoughts do occur, but not because the words are so chosen as logically to bar out all possibilities save one.

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

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.