History Quotes - Page 7

Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

Men make their own history

When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for our use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will look upon with praise and thanksgiving in their hearts.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

We got 16,000 wonderful vehicles. We got all the steel that we make our tanks out of. Of course, we couldn't have done without Western aid.

Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

I decided it is better to scream. . . . Silence is the real crime against humanity.

I am not one of those who believe - broadly speaking - that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

What are your choices? Whom are your choices for? Not just for yourself. Chose now whom you will serve, and that choice is going to affect the next generation, and the next generation, and the next. Choice never affects just one person alone. It goes on and on and the effect goes out into geography and history. You are part of history and your choices become part of history.

To those of you who seek lost objects of history, I wish you the best of luck. They're out there, and they're whispering.

Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.

History is not history unless it is the truth.

Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

The historian amputates reality.

When the rich think about the poor, they have poor ideas.

I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French.

Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the good stuff was far too overcrowded, so you had to pick about in the exotic and extinct. His recommendations were the Picts or the Minoans, because hardly anything was known about them and you could spend a happy lifetime of speculation.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

I am a citizen, not of Athens, or Greece, but of the world.

Don't assume you have to be extraordinary to be used by God. You don't have to have exceptional gifts, talents, abilities, or connections. God specializes in using ordinary people whose limitations and weaknesses make them ideal showcases for His greatness and glory.

As long as we are not ourselves, we will try to be what other people are.

It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.