Quotes by Historians - Page 90

Before it is science and career, before it is livelihood, before even it is family or love, freedom is sound sleep and safety to notice the play of morning sun.
Richard Rhodes
Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.
Theodore Roszak
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed (Albert Einstein)
Deborah Harkness
Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice.
Noam Chomsky
Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.
H.G.Wells
The British were unhinged by the colonists' unorthodox fighting style and shocking failure to abide by gentlemanly rules of engagement. One scandalized British soldier complained that the American riflemen 'conceal themselves behind trees etc. till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done, they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war!
Ron Chernow
... where there's one there's ten.'That's crazy math.
Emma Donoghue
Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Jacques Barzun
His handsome face is suffused with rage. He stands before me shaking, then to my disgust, bursts into noisy tears; "I shall tell my mother of you!" he sobs and crashes out of the chamber
Alison Weir
No other foreskin could have caused such trouble.
Peter Manseau
The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.
Ben Macintyre
Back from where? you're not going out again and leaving me here are you?? Holy Hercules I sound like somebody's wife
Ruth Downie
Remove yourself, sir!
David McCullough
I handed him a beaker and toyed with the pleats of my skirt. The folds kept rippling against my knees in a distracting way. It was one of Naomi's additions to my wardrobe. I quickly decided that I hated it.
Andrea Cremer
And you look beautiful," she added."I look like a cake.""But a beautiful cake.
Andrea Cremer
The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
Robert Conquest
Of course you know, this means war.
Joe Adamson
Heresy no longer existed within religion itwas founded in the state.
Reinhart Koselleck
I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.
Rebecca Solnit
Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile – there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper articles, letters, accounts of events that seemed so important fifty or seventy years ago. All that remains is the insane urge to keep looking, insane because the searcher has no idea what he seeks. What will it be? A photograph? A will? A fragment of a letter? The only way to find out is to look at everything, because it is often when the searcher has gone far beyond the border of futility that he finds the object he never knew he was looking for.
Henry Wiencek
Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg
Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility--space itself--to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions: a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.
Michel de Certeau
The only currency that we really have to spend during our lives is time. Everything else is just a sub-category.
Stephen R. Bown
It has been raining here for ten years.I keep an accurate record of time and can state this with no fear of contradiction.
Alastair Bruce
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
Wallace Stegner
Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. Not William the Silent only, but all the considerable men I have known, and the most undiplomatic and unstrategic of these, forbore to babble of what they were creating and projecting. Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out! Speech is too often not, as the Frenchman defined it, the art of concealing Thought; but of quite stifling and suspending Thought, so that there is none to conceal. Speech too is great, but not the greatest. As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprecfien ist silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern, Silence is golden); or as I might rather express it: Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.
Thomas Carlyle
Our nemesis is time, against which we have a single ally, memory, and even it betrays us.
Sam Tanenhaus
Perhaps life is like an hour glass, with dear ones the sand that slips from the upper glass--the earth--into the second--eternity.
Margaret George
She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren't the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.
Caleb Carr
For after the Battle comes quiet.
H.G.Wells
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg
Time is the most valuable thing that a man can spend.
Diogenes Laërtius
...and spend my days surrounded by wise books, - bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.
H.G.Wells
Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
Thomas Carlyle
How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it.
Rebecca Solnit
I can't see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today's luncheon, something I got into and got out of. And it reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonably well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.
Wallace Stegner
People so often loose sight of the magic in life once they understand how it works.
Thomas Rogal II
1. Do what you say you're gonna do 2. Show up! 3. Give genuine praise whenever you can 4. Never say sorry when you don't mean it 5. Never use sarcasm in email (and use the corny ass emoticons)
Matthew Lasar
Fool! The Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of: what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the Form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ‘here or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see!
Thomas Carlyle
Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East, far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hither-ward from the gray Dawn of Time! Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered. Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all Jo'tuns, Tailor-gods, Double-barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos whatsoever!
Thomas Carlyle
Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.
Thomas Carlyle
Maybe the secret to continued success is as simple as knowing that your past successes could be done so much better now.
Bill Loguidice
For young adults,the growth from silly to serious can be very fast, indeed.
Dean Cumings
The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.
Jerome
Listen, Google,’ I will say, ‘both John and Paul are courting me. I like both of them, but in a different way, and it’s so hard to make up my mind. Given everything you know, what do you advise me to do?’And Google will answer: ‘Well, I know you from the day you were born. I have read all your emails, recorded all your phone calls, and know your favourite films, your DNA and the entire history of your heart. I have exact data about each date you went on, and if you want, I can show you second-by-second graphs of your heart rate, blood pressure and sugar levels whenever you went on a date with John or Paul. If necessary, I can even provide you with accurate mathematical ranking of every sexual encounter you had with either of them. And naturally enough, I know them as well as I know you. Based on all this information, on my superb algorithms, and on decades’ worth of statistics about millions of relationships – I advise you to go with John, with an 87 per cent probability of being more satisfied with him in the long run.Indeed, I know you so well that I also know you don’t like this answer. Paul is much more handsome than John, and because you give external appearances too much weight, you secretly wanted me to say “Paul”. Looks matter, of course; but not as much as you think. Your biochemical algorithms – which evolved tens of thousands of years ago in the African savannah – give looks a weight of 35 per cent in their overall rating of potential mates. My algorithms – which are based on the most up-to-date studies and statistics – say that looks have only a 14 per cent impact on the long-term success of romantic relationships. So, even though I took Paul’s looks into account, I still tell you that you would be better off with John.
Yuval Noah Harari
I knew I was really there, because I was the thing his arms encircled, the thing his love defined.
Carolyn Ives Gilman
I would see him, Edward.'It was no request; he knew it to be an ultimatum. He shook his head violently, not trusting his voice. Time passed. She was staring at him, saying nothing, and on her face was a look of stunned disbelief, of anguished accusation he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life. But when she spoke, her voice held no hint of tears. It was not a voice to offer either understanding or absolution, spoke of no quarter given, of a lifetime of love denied.'God may forgive you for this,' she said, very slowly and distinctly, 'but I never shall.
Sharon Kay Penman
That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.
Howard Zinn
If she does not respect you, she will replace you.
Habeeb Akande
Because he could not afford to fail, he could not afford to trust.
Joseph J. Ellis
He (the immigrant father) would walk by proxy in the Elysian fields of liberal learning.
H.W. Brands
It is more important to me that my students come out of my class believing 'This story is interesting and I might want to know more about it', than to fill them up with information. If I can remind them or convince them that history is interesting then I feel I have succeeded, because unlike chemistry or physics, history is a subject that anyone can teach themselves, if they are interested."[
H.W. Brands
Jefferson was the rare student who came to college already knowing that there could be joy in studying.
John Ferling
Jefferson attributes to a college professor and mentor his lifelong habit of questioning conventional wisdom.
John Ferling
And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick mason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, not sordid money-getting... The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not fame.
W.E.B. Du Bois
One of George H. W. Bush's early teachers at Andover wrote, "At the moment he is intellectually immature for his powers of reasoning are not entirely developed.
H.W. Brands
College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.
Rick Perlstein
Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son into the colonial colleges.
Louis B. Wright
In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house.
H.G.Wells
The author said Frederick Douglass described himself as a "graduate" of slavery with the marks of his diploma on his back.
Harold Holzer