Historian Quotes

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

Geoffrey Blainey

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.

Abstractions are like clouds, which assume a hundred different forms, and which men may run after forever without catching anything real.

Friedrich Ludwig Georg von Raumer

It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things is approximate to their real value....

Ananda Coomaraswamy

I think that the way that Ahmadinejad is talking now shows quite clearly his contempt for the Western world in general and the United States in particular. They feel they are dealing with, as Osama bin Laden put it, an effete, degenerate, pampered enemy incapable of real resistance. And they are proceeding on that assumption. Remember that they have no understanding or experience of the free debate of an open society. Where we see free debate and criticism, they see fear, weakness and division; they proceed accordingly, and every day brings new evidence of that from Iran.

For historians, hindsight can be a treacherous ally. Enabling us to trace the hidden patterns of past events, it beguiles us with the mirage of inevitability, the assumption that different outcomes lay beyond the limits of the possible.

Food, medicine, beauty, and love. When we talk about them in English,
they seem so different from each other. But looking at them from
another perspective, they are not so different. Good food is a part of
good health. Good health leads to good looks. Love surrounds it all.
When we feed or heal, we share love. When we love and are loved, we
are beautiful.

Alma Hogan Snell

The second law, Rakove's law of principle and politics, states that the citizen is influenced by principle in direct proportion to his distance from the political situation.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

Margaret MacMillan

Before the eighteenth century the demographic impact of the profession of medicine remained negligible. Relatively few persons could afford to pay a doctor for his often very expensive services; and for every case in which the doctor's attendance really made a difference between life and death, there were other instances in which even the best available professional services made little difference to the course of the disease, or actually hindered recovery.... Only with the eighteenth century did the situation begin to change; and it was not until after 1850 or so that the practice of medicine and the organization of medical services begin to make large-scale differences in human survival rates and population growth.

William Hardy McNeill

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

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

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

C. Vann Woodward

Before any final solution to American history can occur, a reconciliation must be effected between the spiritual owner of the land - American Indians - and the political owner of the land - American Whites. Guilt and accusations cannot continue to revolve in a vacuum without some effort at reaching a solution.

Vine Deloria Jr.

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)

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.

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

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)

Advice is like rain that soaks everything without being sought.

The computer is no better than its program.

Elting E. Morison

Of Rab Butler:

He seemed like a benign and decent beached whale washed up on the harder shores of modern Conservatism.

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.

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

Agnes Strickland

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

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.

The writings of all great men stand as a perpetual challenge to each succeeding generation which attempts to make an interpretation suitable to its own age.

I. Bernard Cohen