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Tag Archives: Historian

“National armies fight nations, royal armies fight their like; the first obey a mob, always demented, and the second a king, generally sane”. –J.F.C. Fuller

“The only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and proximity to the animal stage”. –Ibn Khaldun

“Politics is the art of stopping people from minding their own business”. –Paul Valéry

“Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength”. –Charles Lamb

“If our squawking pacifists were rational, they would perceive that war can only be ended by abolishing the several species of mammals called human; our spacecraft have shown us that Mars and Venus are perfectly warless worlds”. –Revilo P. Oliver

“The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else”. –Frédéric Bastiat

“The Bill of Rights was not written to protect governments from trouble. It was written precisely to give the people the constitutional means to cause trouble for governments they no longer trusted”. –Henry Steele Commager

“For a soldier I listed, to grow great in fame. And be shot at for sixpence a day”. –Charles Dibdin

“Man is the interpreter of nature, science the right interpretation”. –William Whewell

“The fortunate man is he who, born poor, or nobody, works gradually up to wealth and consideration, and, having got them, dies before he finds they were not worth so much trouble”. –Charles Reade

“Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee”. –Immanuel Kant

“The organic fundamental error of humanism was that it desired to educate the common people (on whom it looked down) from its lofty stance instead of trying to understand them and to learn from them”. –Stefan Zweig

“He who has an opinion of his own, but depends upon the opinion and taste of others, is a slave”. –Friedrich Klopstock

“The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth”. –Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

“Nothing is more curious than the almost savage hostility that Humour excites in those who lack it”. –George Saintsbury

“We have now done what the Romans did when they started to commit suicide. We have shifted from an army of citizens to an army of mercenaries”. –Carroll Quigley

“We are near awakening when we dream that we dream”. –Novalis

“It is decided as you may have expected; all judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape”. –Mary Shelley

“The law is an ass”. –Charles Dickens

“Yet leaving here a name, I trust, That will not perish in the dust”. –Robert Southey

“Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business; and it gives in the long run a net result of zero”. –Thomas Carlyle

“The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party”. –Goldwin Smith

“Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers”. –Lewis Mumford

“In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons”. –Herodotus

“Shared danger is the strongest of all bonds; it keeps men united in spite of mutual dislike and suspicion”. –Livy

“When a state after having passed with safety through many and great dangers arrives at the higher degree of power, and possesses an entire and undisputed sovereignty, it is manifest that the long continuance of prosperity must give birth to costly and luxurious manners…” –Polybius

“God cannot alter the past, though historians can”. –Samuel Butler

“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it”. –Winston Churchill