Historian Quotes

If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.'s. Bless you.

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

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

Considering how bad men are, it is wonderful how well they behave.

Salvador de Madariaga

Science, unguided by a higher abstract principle, freely hands over its secrets to a vastly developed and commercially inspired technology, and the latter, even less restrained by a supreme culture saving principle, with the means of science creates all the instruments of power demanded from it by the organization of Might.

We urgently need a debate about the best ways of supporting families in modern America, without blinders that prevent us from seeing the full extent of dependence and interdependence in American life. As long as we pretend that only poor or abnormal families need outside assistance, we will shortchange poor families, overcompensate rich ones, and fail to come up with effective policies for helping families in the middle.

Stephanie Coontz

Resentment is like taking poison and hoping it'll kill someone else.

Allan M. Brandt

One of the world's greatest needs has ever been unboastful, unbiased history.

Joel Augustus Rogers

On Yahoo! pulling the plug on GeoCities:

[Yahoo!] found the way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse.

Jason Scott Sadofsky

We read the works of the older literature differently from those of our own age; we enjoy them purely aesthetically, that is, indirectly, disinterestedly, perfectly aware of their fictitiousness and of our self-deception.

No one thinks Las Vegas is real; it is illusion, but visitors willingly suspend disbelief and pretend.

Those who sit at the feast will continue to enjoy themselves even though the veil that separates them from the world of toiling reality below has been lifted by mass revolts and critics.

Mary Ritter Beard

Hitler was highly secretive - not least about his personal life, his background, and his family.

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.

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

There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last.

If we look at the parpens piled up on the building site or at the block of bronze, nothing about them manifests that they are suited to being a house or a statue.... Aristotle speaks of the materials considered as such in terms of "the buildable" (I, 201a 16, b Bf), coining an adjective whose suffix expresses capacity (what he calls dunamis). This capacity, as we have seen, cannot be grasped after the manner of that with which perception provides us (color, hardness, etc.); it requires a gaze capable of probing more deeply, of proceeding from the real to the possible—as when Michelangelo "sees" a David in the formless block abandoned by other sculptors.

Mysteries which we have driven outside of the boundaries of our knowledge and which we have located and encompassed, such mysteries will not harm us; on the contrary they will stimulate and inspire us in many ways; the dangerous mysteries are those which are hopelessly mingled with our knowledge, and of which we are perhaps unaware.

To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of 'pushing paint,' breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing.

James Elkins (art historian)

There is a distinction to be drawn between true collectors and accumulators. Collectors are discriminating; accumulators act at random. The Collyer brothers, who died among the tons of newspapers and trash with which they filled every cubic foot of their house so that they could scarcely move, were a classic example of accumulators, but there are many of us whose houses are filled with all manner of things that we "can't bear to throw away.

The hunger and thirst for knowledge, the keen delight in the chase, the good humored willingness to admit that the scent was false, the eager desire to get on with the work, the cheerful resolution to go back and begin again, the broad good sense, the unaffected modesty, the imperturbable temper, the gratitude for any little help that was given - all these will remain in my memory though I cannot paint them for others.

Frederic William Maitland

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.

He [Charles Haughey] was a very promising minister in the '60s, but once he became leader all he was concerned with was staying leader. It was always about the cult of leadership. His sense of himself was much more important than any vision he had for the country. People say he discovered fiscal rectitude in '87, and people talk about his contribution to Anglo-Irish affairs, but really if you try and look for any consistency in his affairs after the late '70s you can't find it because it's just about him.

Diarmaid Ferriter

I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.

Isaac Deutscher

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

I'm looking for what the artist is trying to say and what he or she is actually saying, what the work reveals about society and the timeless conditions of being alive.