Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Without leisure there can be neither art nor science nor fine conversation, nor any ceremonious performance of the offices of love and friendship.
Thus we use our supposed "knowledge" of others to speak on their behalf, and condemn them for their words we ourselves put in their silent mouths.
When I first read Barbara Tuchman's 'The Guns of August' in the autumn of 1963, it was as though history went from black and white to Technicolor.
I'm wary of the new contactless ways of paying. The idea of paying with your phone is a little worrying: I have lost more than one over the years.
It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.
A battle that you win cancels any other bad action of yours. In the same way, by losing one, all the good things worked by you before become vain.
Men are so simple and yield so readily to the desires of the moment that he who will trick will always find another who will suffer to be tricked.
It is a very good exercise, at least from a historian's point of view, to imagine oneself a devout pagan while reading various Christian writings.
It is a part of the intellectual's tragedy that the things he most values about himself and his work are quite unlike those society values in him.
Neighbors are far better acoustic analyzers for determining the quality of their life versus any acoustic instrument left unattended by an expert.
Winning the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or World War II were the turning points in our history, the sine qua non of our forward progress.
The power to regulate the value of money does not involve a power to dilute the value of money by inflation, an absurd and self-serving rendering.
People get into the habit of entrusting the things they desire to wishful thinking, and subjecting things they don't desire to exhaustive thinking
A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.
For education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent.
It is an axiom of political science in the United States that the sole means of neutralizing the effects of newspapers is to multiply their number.
Could Hamlet have been written bya committee, or the Mona Lisa painted by a club? Could the NewTestament have been composed as a conference report?
I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.
If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.
Corporations have at different times been so far unable to distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of lying that their freedom has to be curbed.
What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.
There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'
The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events
It's a tough thing, to know what to do about a war that deep in your gut you feel is wrong and yet watch your peers going off to fight in that war.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.
When we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress.
War is terrorism ... Terrorism is the willingness to kill large numbers of people for some presumably good cause. That's what terrorists are about.
What motivates me is the desire to bring up a whole new generation of active citizens who believe in peace and social justice and will work for it.
[B]inary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capture the messy, inchoate reality of history as lived.
When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day — but by the minute.
We have to keep in mind that it's not just about the numbers of people who died; it's also the manner which many of these victims met their deaths.
History is now strictly organized, powerfully disciplined, but it possesses only a modest educational value and even less conscious social purpose.
If I was an aspirant litterateur, I was also an aspirant anarchist. I have disliked Authority always, though sometimes seduced by its resplendence.
History can predict nothing except that great changes in human relationships will never come about in the form in which they have been anticipated.
Contention is inseparable from creating knowledge. It is not contention we should try to avoid, but discourses that attempt to suppress contention.
Silent pictures show us how we lived and what our attitudes were. And as an art form, they can be wonderfully entertaining and often inspirational.
History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible.
Modernism was born in part out of the need to find fresh ways of expression, to describe a new world that was unlike anything that had gone before.
I think Pope Francis is our Pope Francis. I mean, the point of him is that he's a global leader, and he's trying, I think he's embracing that role.
To congratulate oneself on one's warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.
For style and for creating a mood of optimism and hope - Kennedy on that count is as effective as any president the country has had in its history.
when night came on, the Macedonians and the barbarian crowd suddenly took fright in one of those mysterious panics to which great armies are liable
All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues.
I think that the Greeks were extremely ambivalent about the stories of Amazons: they found them both thrilling and rather daunting at the same time.
To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.
Hitler's economic revolution in Germany had reduced financial considerations to a point where they played no role in economic or political decisions
In an individualistic culture, the narcissist is God's gift to the world. In a collectivist society, the narcissist is God's gift to the collective.
Our goal is to see Big History become a normal part of high school curricula. I'd love to see it being taught in lots of languages. A global course.