Historian Quotes

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

Clifford Dowdey

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

The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon's saying: "I have never had a plan of operations."
Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.

Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Few things reveal more about political leaders and their systems than the manner of their downfall,

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

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

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?

Before the first World War women were arrested for smoking cigarettes in public, for using profanity, for appearing on beaches without stockings, for driving automobiles without a man beside them, for wearing outlandish attire for example, shorts

Geoffrey Perret

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)

But foreign should not be defined in geographical terms. Then it would have no meaning except territorial or tribal patriotism. To me that alone is foreign which is foreign to truth, foreign to Atman.

Poor playthings of the man that's gone,
Surely we would not have them thrown,
Like wreckage on a barren strand,
The prey of every greedy hand.

Frederick York Powell

Architecture is, to a certain extent, a sensual gratification. It addresses itself to the eye, and affords the best scope for the parade of barbaric pomp and splendour. It is the form in which the revenues of a semi-civilized people are most likely to be lavished. The most gaudy and ostentatious specimens of it, and sometimes the most stupendous, have been reared by such hands. It is one of the first steps in the great march of civilization.

William H. Prescott

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)

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

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

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.

From schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are.

David Christian (historian)

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.

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.

Take away wilderness and you take away the opportunity to be American.

They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

The Reformation was cradled in the printing-press, and established by no other instrument.

Agnes Strickland

The basic theme is elementary and should be beyond argument: No logistical system is sound unless its first principal is enlightened conservation of the power of the individual fighter. The second theme, in 1949 a radically new idea, as yet unsupported by incontrovertible scientific proof, is that sustained fear in the male individual is degenerative as prolonged fatigue exhausts body energy no less.

S.L.A. Marshall

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

When we take into account the political conditions, religion and morals of the Macedonians, our conviction is strengthened that they were a Greek race and akin to the Dorians. Having stayed behind in the extreme north, they were unable to participate in the progressive civilization of the tribes which went further south...