Quotes by Historians - Page 2

We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
James Gleick
We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.
James Gleick
I think Jay is in import and export business as his cards say, but he finally found that the second most valuable commodity today is information.""And?""The most valuable?""People with information," I suggested.
Len Deighton
There seems to be a different Chicago around every street corner, behind every bar, and within every apartment, two-flat, cottage, or bungalow. City of immigrants or city of heartless plutocrats, say what you will, Chicago almost defies interpretation. In many ways Chicago is like a snake that sheds its skin every thirty years or so and puts on a new coat to conform to a new reality.
Dominic A. Pacyga
Live as long as you may the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.
Robert Southey
Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.
Friedrich von Schiller
On the trail of another man the biographer must put up with finding himself at every turn: any biography uneasily shelters an autobiography within it.
Paul Murray Kendall
Just as there is nothing between the admirable omelette and the intolerable so with autobiography.
Hilaire Belloc
The llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat With an indolent expression and an undulating throat - Like an unsuccessful literary man.
Hilaire Belloc
He claimed his modest share of the general foolishness of the human race.
Irving Howe
Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.
André Maurois
When I am dead I hope it may be said: 'His sins were scarlet but his books were read.'
Hilaire Belloc
If we try to envisage an 'average Canadian writer' we can see him living near a campus teaching at least part-time at university level mingling too much for his work's good with academics doing as much writing as he can for the CBC and always hoping for a Canada Council Fellowship.
George Woodcock
I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.
Washington Irving
The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James 1st James 2nd and the Old Pretender.
Philip Guedalla
Adversity is like the period of the rain ... cold comfortless unfriendly to man and to animal yet from that season have their birth the flower the fruit the date the rose and the pomegranate.
Sir Walter Scott
Misfortunes tell us what fortune is.
Thomas Fuller
Worry is a form of fear.
Bertrand A. Russell
The world is God's world after all.
Charles Kingsley
The world goes up and the world goes down And the sunshine follows the rain And yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown Can never come over again Sweet wife. No never come over again.
Charles Kingsley
A mad world my masters.
John Taylor
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
James Howell
Most leaders are indispensable but to produce a major social change many ordinary people must also be involved.
Anne Firor Scott
Today whenever women gather together it is not necessarily nurturing. It is coalition building. And if you feel the strain you may be doing some good work.
Bernice Johnson Reagon
Give me a man who sings at his work.
Thomas Carlyle
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
C. Northcote Parkinson
Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.
Thomas Carlyle
He that can work is a born king of something.
Thomas Carlyle
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
Herodotus
No task rightly done is truly private. It is part of the world's work.
Woodrow Wilson
All work is seed sown. It grows and spreads and sows itself anew.
Thomas Carlyle
A good horse should be seldom spurred.
Thomas Fuller
It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed the deeper they burn.
Robert Southey
Plain English - everybody loves it demands it - from the other fellow.
Jacques Barzun
Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.
Gerald Brenan
Wonder is the basis of worship.
Thomas Carlyle
To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.
Sir Walter Scott
Honor women! they entwine and weave heavenly roses in our earthly life.
Friedrich von Schiller
Too fair to worship too divine to love.
Henry Hart Milman
Women are perfectly well aware that the more they seem to obey the more they rule.
Jules Michelet
What will not woman gentle woman dare When strong affection stirs her spirit up?
Robert Southey
There is in every true woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity but which kindles up and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity.
Washington Irving
Men never think their fortunes too great nor their wit too little.
Thomas Fuller
No one could be so wise as Thurlow looked.
Charles James Fox
A proverb is one man's wit and all men's wisdom.
John Russell
Don't let your will roar when your power only whispers.
Thomas Fuller
He knows little who will tell his wife all he knows.
Thomas Fuller
Nothing is easy to the unwilling.
Thomas Fuller
The weakest and most timorous are the most revengeful and implacable.
Thomas Fuller
Change of weather is the discourse of fools.
Thomas Fuller
Thou hast been called O sleep! the friend of woe But 'tis the happy who have called thee so.
Robert Southey
Riches enlarge rather than satisfy appetites.
Thomas Fuller
A bad peace is even worse than war.
Tacitus
War is the science of destruction.
John S.C. Abbott
In peace sons bury their fathers in war fathers bury their sons.
Herodotus
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg
It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts - for democracy.
Woodrow Wilson
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
Barbara Tuchman
All wars are popular for the first 30 days.
Arthur Schlesinger