History Quotes - Page 36

Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.

Miracles happen all the time. We're here, aren't we?

When confronted by a hungry wolf, it is unwise to goad the beast, as Cato would have us do. But it is equally unwise to imagine the snarling animal a friend and offer your hand, as Pompey does." "Perhaps you would have us climb a tree!

History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations.

History is a means of access to ourselves.

In becoming archaeologists of the world of our mothers, we are trying to retrieve the female past and to invent a future.

History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.

History is a needle for putting men asleep anointed with the poison Of all they want to keep.

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.

We were the most conservative revolutionaries in history.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

There is no other Parliament like the English. For the ordinary man, elected to any senate, from Perisa to Peru, they may be a certain satisfaction in being elected... but the man who steps into the English Parliament takes his place in a pageant that has ever been filing by since the birth of English history... York or Lancaster, Protestant or Catholic, Court or Country, Roundhead or Cavalier, Whig or Tory, Liberal or Conservative, Labour or Unionist, they all fit into that long pageant that no other country in the world can show.

Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians.

Virtue is its own reward. There's a pleasure in doing good which sufficiently pays itself.

History without politics descends to mere Literature.

Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right.

The historian ought to be an educated person, writing for other educated people about something which they don't know about, but wish to know about in a way that they can understand.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

Writing history is a method of getting rid of the past.

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

But one sound always rose above the clamor of busy life and, no matter how much of a tintinnabulation, was never confused and, fora moment lifted everything into an ordered sphere: that of the bells.

We are all fools in love.

They can shout down the head of the physics department at Cal Tech.

History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.

The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.