Quotes by Historians - Page 98

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
David Hume
A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.
Leszek Kołakowski
wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner
Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present.
Michel Foucault
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
Karl Marx
I'll follow you, even to death—but I won't live with you any more.
Prosper Mérimée
Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
Karl Marx
The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.
Will Durant
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.
David Hume
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
David Hume
Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
Rebecca Solnit
I was never aware of any other option but to question everything.
Noam Chomsky
...[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American 'Labour Union' in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).
Karl Marx
If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could.
Emma Donoghue
The world has enough women who know how to be smart. It needs women who are willing to be simple. The world has enough women who know how to be brilliant. It needs some who will be brave. The world has enough women who are popular. It needs more who are pure. We need women, and men, too, who would rather be morally right than socially correct.
Peter Marshall
I have seen sights and travelled in countries you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at at a man for his help.
Philippa Gregory
It is better to fill your head with useless knowledge than no knowledge at all.
Jim Hinckley
We Greeks believe that a man who takes no part in public affairs is not merely lazy, but good for nothing
Thucydides
To save all we must risk all.
Friedrich Schiller
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.
Woodrow Wilson
Do you train for passing tests or do you train for creative inquiry?
Noam Chomsky
Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
Yehuda Bauer
He asked, 'Croesus, who told you to attack my land and meet me as an enemy instead of a friend?'The King replied, 'It was caused by your good fate and my bad fate. It was the fault of the Greek gods, who with their arrogance, encouraged me to march onto your lands. Nobody is mad enough to choose war whilst there is peace. During times of peace, the sons bury their fathers, but in war it is the fathers who send their sons to the grave.
Herodotus
Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven't said enough!
Karl Marx
Well-behaved women seldom make history.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
I have given my word that only death will take me from you.
Philippa Gregory
Come clean with a child heartLaugh as peaches in the summer windLet rain on a house roof be a songLet the writing on your facebe a smell of apple orchards on late June.
Carl Sandburg
Everybody's damaged by something.
Emma Donoghue
A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us. . . . It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?' . . . If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time—the stuff of life.
Carl Sandburg
A stumble may prevent a fall.
Thomas Fuller
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
Karl Marx
To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]
David McCullough
People don't always want to be with people. It gets tiring.
Emma Donoghue
Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Carl Sandburg
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Will Durant
Do not ask your childrento strive for extraordinary lives.Such striving may seem admirable,but it is the way of foolishness.Help them instead to find the wonderand the marvel of an ordinary life.Show them the joy of tastingtomatoes, apples and pears.Show them how to crywhen pets and people die.Show them the infinite pleasurein the touch of a hand.And make the ordinary come alive for them.The extraordinary will take care of itself.
William Martin
I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.
Washington Irving
So I learned two things that night, and the next day, from him: the perfection of a moment, and the fleeting nature of it.
Margaret George
I would know you anywhere for my true love. Whoever I was and whoever you were, I would know you at once for my true love.
Philippa Gregory
The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
Michel Foucault
The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.
Rebecca Solnit
I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't do anything but think about him. At night I dream of him, all day I wait to see him, and when I do see him my heart turns over and I think I will faint with desire.
Philippa Gregory
He promised her that he would give her everything, everything she wanted, as men in love always do. And she trusted him despite herself, as women in love always do.
Philippa Gregory