Historian Quotes

Everyone is acquainted with dogs and horses, since they are seen daily. To reproduce their likeness is very difficult. On the other hand, since demons and spiritual beings have no definite form, and no one has ever seen them, they are easy to execute.

'Good wine needs no bush', and if there were need to urge the reading of history it would be proof that history is too dull and unattractive to be read.

Albert Bushnell Hart

I think sometimes - do not we all? - that perhaps the present year is my last year and that all my busyness is foolish.

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

For a century longer, Rome still retains its outward form, but the swarming nations are now in full career.

John Lothrop Motley

It is an old trick. The playgoer who does not like dirty plays is denounced as a prude; the music-lover who resents cacophony is told he is a pedant; and in all these matters the final crushing blow administered to the man of discrimination is the ascription to him of a hidebound prejudice against things that are new because they are new.

Royal Cortissoz

Historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

Veronica Wedgwood

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

Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay.

Robert Conquest

There are two elements of Hayek's background that justify our considering him an Austrian economist: first, that he was raised and went to university in Vienna in the first three decades of the twentieth century, and second, that when he finally decided on economics as his field of study, he was trained within the Austrian tradition in economics.

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

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

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

The twilight zone that lies between living memory and written history is one of the favorite breeding places of mythology.

C. Vann Woodward

You don't mind dying for Queen and country, but you certainly don't want to die for politicians.

Julian Thompson

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.

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

Geoffrey Blainey

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.

The Net is the ultimate empowerment tool. You have the right to express your opinion to a global audience, but everyone has the right not to pay any attention to it.

The computer is no better than its program.

Elting E. Morison

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.

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

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

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

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.