Historian Quotes

A "Crucial Experiment" is Impossible in Physics.

Pierre Duhem
Pierre Duhem
The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense.

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.

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
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
It is useful to ask oneself questions, but very dangerous to answer them.

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

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.

Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay.

Robert Conquest
Robert Conquest
Repeal is generally more difficult than original passage.

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

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
Frederick York Powell
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."

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

Agnes Strickland
Agnes Strickland
Republicans have taken the stand that economic opportunity is central to the American ideal and that it is the government's responsibility to make it possible for everyone to rise.

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

Four hundred years is but a moment in 10,000 years. Time is curved, time is braided. Throw out your clocks.

No wars are unintended or 'accidental'. What is often unintended is the length and bloodiness of the war.

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.

Jerry Saltz
Jerry Saltz
The human desire to escape the flesh, which took one form in asceticism, might take another form in the creation of machines. Thus, the wish to rise above the bestial body manifested itself not only in angels but in mechanical creatures. Certainly, once machines existed, humans clearly attached to them feelings of escape from the flesh.

When the interval between the intellectual classes and the practical classes is too great, the former will possess no influence, the latter will reap no benefit.

Henry Thomas Buckle
Henry Thomas Buckle
People seem always actually to know, with a degree of pain that has required the comfort of fairy tales, that when you are dressed in any particular way at all, you are revealed rather than hidden.

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.

Jules Michelet
Jules Michelet
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.

Effective coordination of throughput required the placing of vigorous management controls over these despots.

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