Historian Quotes

The creation of Modern France through expansion goes back to the establishment of a small kingdom in the area around Paris in the late tenth century and was not completed until the incorporation of Nice and Savoy in 1860. The existing "hexagon" was the result of a long series of wars and conquests involving the triumph of French language and culture over what once were autonomous and culturally distinctive communities. The assimilation of Gascons, Savoyards, Occitans, Basques, and others helped to sustain the myth that French overseas expansionism in the nineteenth century, especially to North and West Africa, was a continuation of the same assimilationist project.

George M. Fredrickson

Style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and a meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist andthe broad outlook of a group are visible,... communicating and fixing certain values of religious, social, and moral life through the emotional suggestiveness of forms. It is, besides, a common ground against which innovations and individuality of particular works may be measured.

To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won… it was unheard of, but that is exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.

Robert M. Edsel

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.

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

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

Truth can thus only percolate in the form of hearsay.

Robert Conquest

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.

Samuel Hartlib, a celebrated writer on husbandry in the last century, a gentleman much beloved and esteemed by Milton, in his preface to the work, commonly called his Legacy, laments greatly that no public director of husbandry was established in England By Authority; and that we had not adopted the Flemish custom of letting farms upon improvement... Cromwell, in consequence of this admirable performance, allowed Hartlib a pension of 100l. a year ; and Hartlib afterwards, the better to fulfil the intentions of his benefactor, procured Dr. Beati's excellent annotations on the Legacy, with other valuable pieces from bis numerous correspondents.

I suppose that if we in intelligence were one day given three wishes, they would be to know everything, to be believed when we spoke, and in such a way to exercise an influence to the good in the matter of policy.

During my tenure at the Endowment, I often found that those who did us the most damage did so under the justification of helping us by 'preventing worse language.' In the military it would be called friendly fire. One ends up just as dead.

John Frohnmayer

A totally unexpected development followed; the Queen and the Irish people fell in love with each other. The affection was brief, the participants unsuited, the episode soon forgotten and the course of history uninfluenced, but for a few days in August, 1849, the attraction was a reality.

Cecil Woodham-Smith

Our thesis now is that the Portuguese seafarers and scientists of the 15th and 16th centuries made an important contribution to the rise of modern science by unintentionally undermining the belief in scientific authorities and by strengthening the confidence in an empirical, natural, historical method.

Reijer Hooykaas

When the first settlers landed on American shores, the difficulties in finding or making shelter must have seemed ironical as well as almost unbearable.

Alice Morse Earle

I do not think that a man's rise to power is necessarily the climax of his life or that his loss of office should be equated with his fall.

Isaac Deutscher

We read the works of the older literature differently from those of our own age; we enjoy them purely aesthetically, that is, indirectly, disinterestedly, perfectly aware of their fictitiousness and of our self-deception.

... the whole point of studying and teaching mathematics was that it demonstrated how universal truth imposed itself upon the world—rationally, hierarchically, and inescapably. Ideally, the Jesuits believed, the truths of religion would be imposed on the world just like geometrical theorems, leaving no room for avoidance or denial by Protestant or other heretics and leading to the inevitable triumph of the Church.

Amir R. Alexander

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

Howard Mansfield

Contemporary political theorists continue this type of thinking about democracy by arguing that the development of "public judgment" among regular citizens should be made the central concern of modern politics. Public judgment, in the words of Benjamin Barber, is a function of commonality that can be exercised only by citizens interacting with one another in the context of mutual deliberation and decision.

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?

A "Crucial Experiment" is Impossible in Physics.

And last, we must bear in mind that the relationships between perception, thought, emotion, and behavior are neither automatic nor consistent. In many cases they are demonstrably affected or directed by culture and socialization. We don't just want what we want because we want it; we want what we want because that's what we've learned to want.

Now, the truth of the matter is that the idea of the meaning of the word 'federal' underwent a change from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. Under the Constitution, the states gave up their sovereignty in the Calhounian sense. And if you have any doubt about that, let me just read a sentence from George Washington. 'It is obviously impracticable in the federal government of these states to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all'. So all the rights of independent sovereignty, or some of those rights, have been surrendered.

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

Geniuses... are more apt to indicate the line of march into the future than to reflect the consensus accepted in their own time.

Richard S. Westfall