Historian Quotes

My definition of modernism took a while to develop.

My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.

Every historian has informally an anthropology, without ever using the word.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

There is something very intriguing about, for example, the sense of accomplishment that a small child has, which you might be able to reduce to aggression and libido, but which might also have some independent existence.

So long as large armies go to battle, so long will the air arm remain their spearhead.

Leadership is particularly necessary to ensure ready acceptance of the unfamiliar and that which is contrary to tradition.

The very exercise of leadership fosters capacity for it.

Writers are frequently asked why they wrote their first book. A more interesting answer might come from asking them why they wrote their second one.

In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise but doesn't work very well.

I think the reason working-class people don't write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books.

I store away my experiences and don't feel really happy until I've found a way to write about them.

Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer.

To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it - this is a hard lesson.

The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you.

Say this for big league baseball - it is beyond any question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America.

Our American heritage is greater than any one of us. It can express itself in very homely truths; in the end it can lift up our eyes beyond the glow in the sunset skies.

In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting for a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train.

I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what a great many young men on both sides felt and believed and were brave enough to do.

Early youth is a baffling time.

Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made.

And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.

Better a bad excuse, than none at all.

The early bird catches the worm.

The sea hath fish for every man.

Magic in cinema is a bit like ventriloquism on the radio.

Everyone will tell you how rigid I am, but a teacher has to be flexible. You can't cut the student to your cloth; you have to cut yourself to theirs.

The public is wiser than the wisest critic.

The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.

If reason is a universal faculty, the decision of the common mind is the nearest criterion of truth.