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

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

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

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.

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

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

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

The American dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as a man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.

James Truslow Adams

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.

As for rioting, the old Roman way of dealing with that is always the right one; flog the rank and file, and fling the ringleaders from the Tarpeian rock.

The introduction of the Christian religion into the world has produced an incalculable change in history. There had previously been only a history of nations — there is now a history of mankind; and the idea of an education of human nature as a whole, — an education the work of Jesus Christ Himself — is become like a compass for the historian, the key of history, and the hope of nations.

Jean-Henri Merle d'Aubigné

People might say these (my) books are frivolous, but I don't see them that way. I think they're very impressively designed – just in an unconventional format.

Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos.

Thomas A. Bailey

In England the practice of "virtual" representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection.

He who would form a correct judgment of their tone, must hear first one bell and then the other.

Filippo Baldinucci

In 1688 England contracted to the Netherlands the highest debt that one nation can owe to another. Herself not knowing how to recover her liberties, they were restored by men of the United Provinces.

George Bancroft

This museum is a torpedo moving through time, its head the ever-advancing present, its tail the ever-receding past of 50 to 100 years ago.

Tyrants forbid citizens to do their duty as free men. Free government permits them to do it. Liberal Education permits them to do it.

Stringfellow Barr

It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.

Thou shall not be a perpetrator, thou shall not be a victim, and thou shall never, but never, be a basterd.

It may well be that men of science, not kings, or warriors, or even statesmen are to be the heroes of the future.

Charles A. Beard

No class of Americans, so far as I know, has ever objected... to any amount of governmental meddling if it appeared to benefit that particular class.

The opponents of the postmodernist cultural studies of science condude confidently from the Sokal affair that "the emperors... have no clothes." But who, exactly, are all those naked emperors? At whom should we be laughing?

The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.

Bernard Berenson