Historian Quotes

Tacitus

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

H. G. Wells

Ibn Khaldun

Washington Irving

Edward Gibbon

Herodotus

Wilson was a visionary who liked to identify himself with "forward-looking man"; Harding … was as old-fashioned as those wooden Indians which used to stand in front of cigar stores.... Wilson thought in terms of the whole world; Harding was for America first. And, finally, whereas Wilson wanted America to exert itself nobly, Harding wanted to give it a rest.

Frederick Lewis Allen

Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.

Noble character is best appreciated in those ages in which it can most readily develop.

Individual ambition is undoubtedly a strong motive in student work, but there is such a thing among students everywhere as ambition for others, call it class spirit, esprit de corps, good fellowship, or good will to men.

Herbert Baxter Adams

In all parts of the Old World, as well as of the New, it was evident that Columbus had kindled a fire in every mariner's heart. That fire was the harbinger of a new era, for it was not to be extinguished.

Charles Kendall Adams

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

You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It only wants to show what actually happened.

Leopold von Ranke

The itch of inquiry is ever vehement in him [the statistician], and he attaches himself to new questions as buoys made to float him into paradise.

Marshall Monroe Kirkman

Is there any sign of spring quite so welcome as the glint of the first bluebird unless it is his softly whistled song? No wonder the bird has become the symbol for happiness. Before the farmer begins to plough the wet earth, often while snow is still on the ground, this hardy little minstrel is making himself very much at home in our orchards and gardens while waiting for a mate to arrive from the South.

Neltje Blanchan

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.

As a nation we are, however, slowly accepting the fact that the loose-jointed, easy-going, somewhat irresponsible system of administration which we carried over from our rural, agricultural background is no longer adequate for present and future needs.

Leonard D. White

History is primarily a socio-psychological science. In the conflict between the old and the new tendencies in historical investigation...we are at the turn of the stream, the parting of the ways in historical science.

Karl Gotthard Lamprecht

Women owe Friedan an incalculable debt for The Feminine Mystique. Domesticity was not a satisfactory story of an intelligent woman's life.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

The temperament of a collector is an interesting one; after all, necessity is never the raison d'être of a collection. And since a collection can never be complete — there is always another item or a better version available — its creation requires a predatory love of objects and an endless appetite.

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

Constance Rourke

An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces.

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.

The second law, Rakove's law of principle and politics, states that the citizen is influenced by principle in direct proportion to his distance from the political situation.

Give me a well-cooked, well-served meal, a bouquet, and a sunset, and I can do more for a man's soul than all the cant ever preached. I can even do it without a sunset!

Ann Ellis Hanson

Only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

The computer is no better than its program.

Elting E. Morison

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.

How could anyone be "Cary Grant"? But how can anyone, ever after, not consider the attempt?

Advice is like rain that soaks everything without being sought.

Jesus Christ rose from the grave.' With this proclamation, the Christian church began. This may be the fundamental element of Christian faith; certainly it is the most radical.