History Quotes - Page 35

• The only good histories are those written by those who had command in the events they describe.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Events, Command, Written

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• Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.

  Anton Chekhov

  Battle, Conflict, Facets

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• John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were political enemies, but they became fast friends. And when they passed away on the same day, the last words of one of them was, The country is safe. Jefferson still lives. And the last words of the other was, John Adams will see that things go forward.

  Harry S. Truman

  Friendship, Country, Political

  Harry S. Truman (1967). “The Quotable Harry S. Truman”, Anderson, S.C. : Droke House, distributed by Grosset & Dunlap

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• Americans, more than most people, believe that history is the result of individual decisions to implement conscious intentions. For Americans, more than most people, history has been that.... This sense of openness, of possibility and autonomy, has been a national asset as precious as the topsoil of the Middle West. But like topsoil, it is subject to erosion; it requires tending. And it is not bad for Americans to come to terms with the fact that for them too, history is a story of inertia and the unforeseen.

  George Will

  Believe, Erosion, People

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• Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars; just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,--the every-day life of each particular time and country.

  Richard Whately

  Country, Rocks, Giving

  Richard Whately (1856). “Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley”, p.194

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• All the historians are Harvard people. It just isn't fair. Poor old Hoover from West Branch, Iowa, had no chance with that crowd;nor did Andrew Jackson from Tennessee. Nor does Lyndon Johnson from Stonewall, Texas. It just isn't fair.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Texas, Iowa, People

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• The French Revolution, Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the three greatest tendencies of the age. Whoever takes offence at this combination, and whoever does not consider a revolution important unless it is blatant and palpable, has not yet risen to the lofty and broad vantage point of the history of mankind.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Important, Age, Doe

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• The two basic maxims of the so-called historical criticism are the postulate of the common and the axiom of the ordinary. Postulate of the common: everything really great, good, and beautiful, is improbable, since it is extraordinary and therefore at least suspect. Axiom of the ordinary: our conditions and environment must have existed everywhere, for they are really so natural.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Beautiful, Two, Historical

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• ... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

  Catharine Beecher

  Civilization, Race, Humanity

  Catharine Esther Beecher (1857). “Common Sense Applied to Religion: Or, The Bible and the People”, p.37

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• It is the minority that has stood in the vain of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world.

  John Bartholomew Gough

  War, Accomplishment, Achievement

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• The economic interpretation of history does not necessarily mean that all events are determined solely by economic forces. It simply means that economic facts are the ever recurring decisive forces, the chief points in the process of history.

  Eduard Bernstein

  Mean, Events, Doe

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• Conventional history completely ignores half the human race.

  Barbara Mertz

  Race, Half, Humans

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• History ... isn't simply what has happened. It's a judgment on what has happened.

  Cynthia Ozick

  Judgment, Happened

  Cynthia Ozick (1996). “A Cynthia Ozick Reader”, p.15, Indiana University Press

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• We decipherers cannot afford to be as picky as the linguist, who can always run back to a native speaker for a few more forms.

  E. J. W. Barber

  Running, Form, Picky

  E. J. W. Barber (1974). “Archaeological Decipherment: A Handbook”

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• Unlike modern military codes, ancient texts are almost never purposely misleading, purposely scrambled. ... indeed, literacy was so uncommon until classical times that the very writing of a message sufficed to keep it from almost everybody.

  E. J. W. Barber

  Military, Reading, Writing

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• The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Bible, Civilization, Elements

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.97

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• You know I am given to antiquarian and genealogical pursuits. An old family letter is a delight to my eyes. I can prowl in old trunks of letters by the day with undiminished zest.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Family, Eye, Zest

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• History is constantly repeating itself, making only such changes of programme as the growth of nations and centuries requires.

  James A. Garfield

  Growth, Century, Programmes

  Garfield, James A. (1882). “The works of James Abram Garfield. (2 Volumes) Volume 1”, p.23, Best Books on

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• If you write a post and put it on a blog, that's a historical document. If you change your template, then that entry looks completely different. It's the same words, but not the same meaning. This all depends on what historical questions that people will be asking and we can't know what they will want.

  Joshua Greenberg

  Writing, People, Historical

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• To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.

  George McGovern

  Military, War, Failure

  1973 Lecture at Oxford University, 21 Jan.

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• A lot of Democrats have said that raising the minimum wage is both good economics and good politics. The nonpartisan CBO issued a report today saying that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would cost the economy about 500,000 jobs...Why should we trust Democrats on anything when they couldn't have foreseen that this would be the case?

  S. E. Cupp

  Money, Jobs, Work

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• So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.

  Frank Nugent

  Dog, Dirty, Book

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• While the scientist, on the one hand, is concerned with giving a faithful description of facts, on the other, he has the equally important task of construing them in relation to some explanatory conjecture. Similarly the historian has a double duty: both of reporting the past as nearly as possible as it passed or was lived through by men at the time (without doctoring up events to fit later developments or some more "enlightened reading" of them); and second, of interpreting their import in the light of a present hypothesis.

  Marie Taylor Collins Swabey

  Reading, Science, Past

  Marie Taylor Collins Swabey (1954). “The judgment of history”

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• History remembers most what you did last.

  Christopher Plummer

  Inspirational, Motivational, Lasts

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• My challenge was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly.

  John Hope Franklin

  Inspirational, Motivational, Challenges

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