Famous quotes by Historians

"It is simply not true that war is solely a means to an end, nor do people necessarily fight in order to obtain this objective or that. In fact, the opposite is true: people very often take up one objective or another precisely in order that they may fight"

Martin van Creveld, Historian

"In over 160 years of recorded baseball history, no team had ever won a championship this way"

John Thorn, Historian

"Finally, for all of us but a lucky few, the dream of playing big-time baseball is relinquished so we can get on with grown-up things"

John Thorn, Historian

"But baseball bounced back in the next decade to reclaim its place as the national pastime: new heroes, spirited competition, and booming prosperity gave birth to dreams of expansion, both within the major leagues and around the world"

John Thorn, Historian

"Where's the progress that we're going to see in Afghanistan? You have to keep public support both on the economy and the war or these things will really become troubling!"

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Historian

"The great medley of Oregon and California emigrants, at their camps around Independence, had heard reports that several additional parties were on the point of setting out from St. Joseph's farther to the northward"

Francis Parkman, Historian

"When the Chinese first came to San Francisco, they were actually welcomed by the mayor and they had special ceremonies for them-again this is when their colony was very small, only a few Chinese"

Iris Chang, Historian

"I received an honorary doctorate for my work. Maybe one of these works is considered the equivalent of a Ph.D"

Iris Chang, Historian

"Not a breath of air stirred over the free and open prairie; the clouds were like light piles of cotton; and where the blue sky was visible, it wore a hazy and languid aspect"

Francis Parkman, Historian

"Crossing the Penobscot, one found a visible descent in the scale of humanity"

Francis Parkman, Historian

"America, when it became known to Europeans, was, as it had long been, a scene of wide-spread revolution"

Francis Parkman, Historian

"I have to finish this book tour of almost 30 cities"

Iris Chang, Historian

"For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction"

Iris Chang, Historian

"Even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich"

Arthur Bryant, Historian

"The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement explain American development"

Frederick Jackson Turner, Historian

"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"

Robert Conquest, Historian

"As history since Hiroshima shows, the best, perhaps the only, way to curb war is to deter it with such overwhelming force as to turn it from a struggle into suicide"

Martin van Creveld, Historian

"The greatest men you can quote for everything"

John Acton, Historian

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"

John Acton, Historian

"If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation"

John Acton, Historian

"History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong"

John Acton, Historian

"Far from being the product of a democratic revolution and of an opposition to English institutions, the Constitution of the United States was the result of a powerful reaction against democracy, and in favor of the traditions of the mother country"

John Acton, Historian

"The fate of every democracy, of every government based on the sovereignty of the people, depends on the choices it makes between these opposite principles, absolute power on the one hand, and on the other, the restraints of legality and the authority of tradition"

John Acton, Historian

"One of the first lessons he or she learns is that in baseball anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Just two days ago as I write this, something happened that had never happened in baseball before"

John Thorn, Historian

"In response to the challenge of strangers, sport arose as a sublimated representation of a community's armed might as well as its pride of place and clan"

John Thorn, Historian

"For many in baseball, September is a month of stark contrast with April, when everyone had dared to hope. If baseball is a lot like life, as pundits declare, it is because life is more about losing than winning"

John Thorn, Historian

"Do we settle on a regional team because we can go to its ballpark and see its games on television? Or do we choose a team as our favorite because it has an especially appealing player, a Barry Bonds or an Ichiro?"

John Thorn, Historian

"Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come"

John Thorn, Historian

"Baseball presents a living heritage, a game poised between the powerful undertow of seasons past and the hope of next day, next week, next year"

John Thorn, Historian

"If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent, then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot"

Martin van Creveld, Historian

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