Historian Quotes

Every day may not be good... but there's something good in every day

Throughout history many nations have suffered a physical defeat, but that has never marked the end of a nation. But when a nation has become the victim of a psychological defeat, then that marks the end of a nation.

The past resembles the future more than one drop of water resembles another.

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.

Government is an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it commits itself.

Man is essentially ignorant, and becomes learned through acquiring knowledge.

Don't climb mountains so that people can see you. Climb mountains that you can see the world.

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

He who finds a new path is a pathfinder, even if the trail has to be found again by others; and he who walks far ahead of his contemporaries is a leader, even though centuries pass before he is recognized as such.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

Power is not an institution, and not a structure;

neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.

Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.

The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

At the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of the dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.

Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization.

It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption.

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.

The reason the Christians have murdered on such a vast scale and killed anyone and everyone in their way is purely and simply greed.

If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.

When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.

I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.

If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

No man who has not sat in the assemblies of men can know the light, odd and uncertain ways in which decisions are often arrived at.

Businesses owned by responsible and organized merchants shall eventually surpass those owned by wealthy rulers.

What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind and this trade [in Indian slaves] as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel among them.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

Therefore, the Negro nation are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

We have a wonderful history behind us.

... If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, 'You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else'.

...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

People are largely ignorant of the interests of the human species.

All the sciences came to exist in Arabic.

The systematic works on them were written in Arabic writing.

The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians.

...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality.

But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

The term of life of a dynasty does not normally exceed three generations.

For in the first generation are still preserved the characteristic features of rough, uncivilized rural life, such as hard conditions of life, courage, ferocity, and partnership in authority. Therefore the strength of the 'Asabiya is maintained.

'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth.

The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.

Geometry enlightlens the intellect and sets one's mind right

The Berbers belong to a powerful, formidable, and numerous people;

a true people like so many others, the world has seen - like the Arabs, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans.

Beyond [known peoples of black West Africa] to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings.

War, once declared, must be waged offensively, aggressively.

The enemy must not be fended off; but smitten down. You may then spare him every exaction, relinquish every gain, but „til then he must be struck incessantly and remorselessly.

In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.