Historian Quotes

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

The hope of a new politics does not lie in formulating a left-wing reply to the right-it lies in rejecting conventional political categories.

The family wage has been eroded by the same developments that have promoted consumerism as a way of life.

It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.

In our society, daily experience teaches the individual to want and need a never-ending supply of new toys and drugs.

Conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism. They have a distorted understanding of the traditional values they claim to defend.

The model of ownership, in a society organized round mass consumption, is addiction.

Ideologies, however appealing, cannot shape the whole structure of perceptions and conduct unless they are embedded in daily experiences that confirm them.

The job of the press is to encourage debate, not to supply the public with information.

Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

Conservatives unwittingly side with the social forces that contribute to the destruction of traditional values.

A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.

The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.

The attempt to redefine the family as a purely voluntary arrangement grows out of the modern delusion that people can keep all their options open all the time.

It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.

Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.

When I was a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, my parents and grandparents spoke of Britain as home, and New Zealand had this strong sense of identity and coherence as being part of the commonwealth and a the identity of its people as being British.

It's definitely going to be harder than it sounds to acquire millions of users in the U.S. It's going to be a lot of work, and you can't make light of that.

If you have a little extra parking, I err on the side of getting rid of it in favor of having some more greenery.

I see the great continuities in New Zealand history as being decency and common sense and up until now when we've confronted these things we've been able to talk them through, and I'm sure we will with this issue as well.

Big media companies have lots of money and content, but they have no way to tap into a good base of users.

A huge change has taken place in my lifetime.

The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it.

The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

The accords were fig leaves of democratic procedure to hide the nakedness of Stalinist dictatorship.

One sometimes feels a guest of one's time and not a member of its household.

The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.

Heroism is endurance for one moment more.