Famous quotes by Historians

"No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought"

Wilhelm Dilthey, Historian

"But having said all of that, that still doesn't account for a lot of the increase in popularity which stems, I think, from Lincoln's personal characteristics"

David Herbert Donald, Historian

"I'm not sure Lincoln would fare well if he were a presidential candidate today"

David Herbert Donald, Historian

"I was able to sit at Lincoln's side and see how he thought and how he acted, and how he felt about what was going on around him. I felt the pressures that were on him. You can see what people were writing to him, how they were nudging him!"

David Herbert Donald, Historian

"The big biography of Lincoln necessarily had to do so much with his political career, his ambitions, his accomplishments in public, with less time to spend on his private life, his inner life, and I thought this might be a way of getting at that"

David Herbert Donald, Historian

"If you think about it, the historian's task is like that of the detective"

David Herbert Donald, Historian

"Well, it seems to me Lincoln, I suppose, is kind of a model of a particular sort of presidency, a presidency that first of all is elected by a minority of the votes"

David Herbert Donald, Historian

"But I have tried to go over it very carefully, not merely what the evidence is, but with psychoanalysts and psychologists, and I think we're just about all agreed that Lincoln and Speed did not have a homosexual relationship"

David Herbert Donald, Historian

"The corruption of people is to behave in an inhuman way"

Alan Bullock, Historian

"Spending a weekend with Hitler would have been boring in the extreme, although you would have had a greater certainty in coming back alive"

Alan Bullock, Historian

"Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work"

Alan Bullock, Historian

"Bullock by name, and Bullock by nature"

Alan Bullock, Historian

"America has been another name for opportunity"

Frederick Jackson Turner, Historian

"So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power"

Frederick Jackson Turner, Historian

"The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history"

Frederick Jackson Turner, Historian

"Up to our own day, American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development"

Frederick Jackson Turner, Historian

"The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities"

John Acton, Historian

"Yes, we've seen it all before. And yes, those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. But no, the sky is not falling - baseball is such a great game that neither the owners nor the players can kill it. After some necessary carnage, market forces will prevail"

John Thorn, Historian

"Pursuing employment or climatic relief, we live in voluntary exile from our extended families and our longer past, but in an involuntary exile from ourselves and our own past"

John Thorn, Historian

"Planning to play: that's what saving for retirement is today - and it is antithetical to the nature of play, fully within the definition of work, and blissfully ignorant of the reality of death"

John Thorn, Historian

"More fundamentally, it is a dream that does not die with the onset of manhood: the dream is to play endlessly, past the time when you are called home for dinner, past the time of doing chores, past the time when your body betrays you, past time itself"

John Thorn, Historian

"I think that much of this was running in background as I contemplated whether or not to attend the PS 99 reunion, although I certainly anticipated that I would not; it smelled like death, not youth"

John Thorn, Historian

"For many of us, sport has provided the continuity in our lives, the alternative family to the one we left behind. It gives us something to talk about, to preen about, to care about"

John Thorn, Historian

"Donning a glove for a backyard toss, or watching a ball game, or just reflecting upon our baseball days, we are players again, forever young"

John Thorn, Historian

"Distant replay morphs into instant replay, and future replay cannot be far off"

John Thorn, Historian

"Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time"

Frederick Jackson Turner, Historian

"Liberty is the condition of duty, the guardian of conscience. It grows as conscience grows. The domains of both grow together. Liberty is safety from all hindrances, even sin. So that Liberty ends by being Free Will"

John Acton, Historian

"By a series of violent shocks, the nations in succession have struggled to shake off the Past, to reverse the action of Time and the verdict of success, and to rescue the world from the reign of the dead"

John Acton, Historian

"The enemy resembles us. Therefore, he needs to be approached not as an assembly of 'targets' to be destroyed one by one, but as a living, intelligent entity capable of acting and reacting"

Martin van Creveld, Historian

"Sun Tzu does not need my praise. His work has lived for over two thousand years, and will surely live for another two thousand without any help from me"

Martin van Creveld, Historian

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