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.

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.

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.

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.

More attention should have been given to the fundamental transformation which took place during Queen Victoria's reign, from ruling sovereign to constitutional monarch. Again, gender mattered. If Albert had lived, it seems clear that he would have resisted that development much more tenaciously, which the gradual emasculation (and feminization) of monarchy was probably more easily accomplished when a woman was on the throne.

David Cannadine
David Cannadine
History requires no less study than Law. We cannot dabble in its practical application. Would you take upon yourself to pay down your purchase-money for an acre of land, upon your knowledge of conveyancing derived from Blackstone's Commentaries?

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.

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

Frances Yates
Frances Yates
Science hangs in a void of nescience, a planet turning in the dark.

Even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich.

Delusion about history is a serious matter; it can gravely affect the history that is waiting to be made.

The greatest Marxist writer of the twentieth century, paradoxically, is also one of the greatest examples of the independence of the human spirit from its material limitations.

Until the late-nineteenth-century the House of Commons maintained a formal ban on the reporting of its debates.

History is full of the dead weight of things which have escaped the control of the mind, yet drive man on with a blind force.

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.

As paleontology now prepares for a great leap forward into a computerised age there is perhaps a danger that it may lose sight of its historic origins in the "steam age" of science and before.

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.

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.

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.

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

Degrees of freedom. The number of fetters on the statistician. The number of d.f. is usually considered self-evident — except for the analysis of data that have not appeared in a textbook.

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