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.

A Systems Esthetic will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-technical conditions rooted only in the present.

Life and study have persuaded me of the openness of history. There is no inevitability in history. Thinking about what might have happened, what could have happened, is a necessary element in trying to understand what did happen. And if, as I believe, individual acts of decency and courage make a difference, then they need to be recorded and remembered.

And it is a serious matter to destroy a man's faith without replacing it.

Tact is not only kindness, but kindness skillfully extended.

James G. Randall

Most Blacks had supported the courageous struggles of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) against both school inequality and school segregation. The demise of their schools and the inequitable burdens of school desegregation, however, raised new doubts. There emerged a notable continuity between older, more conservative African American voices, which had given the building of strong Black schools priority over desegregation, and the newer "militant" expressions of Black separatism and community control.

David S. Cecelski

Like the high whine of the dentist's drill, the low rumble of the footnote on the historian's page reassures.

Anthony Grafton

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

Among Hindu groups, none has made as great an impact on America as the Vedanta Society.

J. Gordon Melton

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

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

The Lee myth. Lee being above slavery, Lee being in fact anti-slavery, is essential to the neo-Confederate argument that it's not about race, it's not about slavery. They've done a very good job of covering up Robert E. Lee's actual positions on this.

Brooks D. Simpson

Australians, like other peoples, tend to think they are highly distinctive, but the characteristics they value may be an extension or an exaggeration of what they brought from the mother country. In some respects they may be more like the peoples of other new lands settled by the British than they are willing to acknowledge. Australian soldiers and Australian nurses of World War I felt themselves to be very different from their English counterparts but the English were inclined to see all the colonials - New Zealanders, Canadians and Australians - as similar and different from themselves.

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

In the late 1950s, experiments such as the cybernetic sculptures of Nicolas Schöffer or the programmatic music compositions of John Cage and Iannis Xenakis transposed systems theory from the sciences to the arts. By the 1960s, artists as diverse as Roy Ascott, Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Sonia Sheridan, and Stephen Willats were breaking with accepted aesthetics to embrace open systems that emphasized organism over mechanism, dynamic processes of interaction among elements, and the observer's role as an inextricable part of the system. Jack Burnham's 1968 Artforum essay Systems Aesthetics and his 1970 Software exhibition marked the high point of systems-based art until its resurgence in the changed conditions of the twenty-first century.

Edward A. Shanken

One of the world's greatest needs has ever been unboastful, unbiased history.

Joel Augustus Rogers

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

An emotional man may possess no humor, but a humorous man usually has deep pockets of emotion, sometimes tucked away or forgotten.

Constance Rourke

Such is the past career, present condition, and certain future of the Middle American. There are as many above him as below him, and especially as many below him as above him.

Repeal is generally more difficult than original passage.

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