Historian Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

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.

The only thing workers have to bargain with is their skill or their labor. Denied the right to withhold it as a last resort, they become powerless. The strike is therefore not a breakdown of collective bargaining-it is the indispensable cornerstone of that process.

Paul Clark (educator)

Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay.

Robert Conquest

Improvement depends far less upon length of tasks and hours of application than is supposed. Children can take in but a little each day; they are like vases with a narrow neck; you may pour little or pour much, but much will not enter at a time.

His [the Virginian's] dream was to found an aristocratic republic, in which superior individuals would emerge to rule the many.

Clifford Dowdey

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.

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

Certainty creates strength. Certainty gives one something upon which to learn. Uncertainty creates weakness. Uncertainty makes one tentative if not fearful, and tentative steps, even when in the right direction, may not overcome significant obstacles.

It is clear that history differs from the other disciplines in having
an approach and not an area of its own.

Leonard Krieger

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

Salvador de Madariaga

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

Allan M. Brandt

When you can't see any reason for loving a person, you must be loving him as a symbol of something, don't you think so?

The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.

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.

Physics in antiquity remained closely connected with philosophy, and was predominantly concerned with the philosophical category of the "why," rather than the scientific category of the "how."

Ludwig Edelstein

This filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts.

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.

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

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