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Historian Of The Modern Age Inspirational Quotes (513)

Page 6 of 22
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I will try not to overlook the cruelties that victims inflict on one another as they are jammed together in the boxcars of the system. I don’t want to romanticize them. But I do remember (in rough paraphrase) a statement I once read: “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.
Howard Zinn
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Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.
Gerald Brenan
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I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.
Howard Zinn
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Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
Henry Adams
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The male clerk with his quill pen and copper-plate handwriting had gone for good. The female short-hand typist took his place. It was a decisive moment in women's emancipation.
A. J. P. Taylor
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If historians are not skeptical, they are nothing.
Geoffrey Elton
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Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.
Howard Zinn
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What is called “apathy” is, I believe, a feeling of helplessness on the part of the ordinary citizen, a feeling of impotence in the face of enormous power. It’s not that people are apathetic they do care about what is going on, but don’t know what to do about it, so they do nothing, and appear to be indifferent.
Howard Zinn
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The Roman Empire came to an end, but the Roman people didn't come to an end, so I see the American Empire coming to an end just as other empires have come to an end.
Howard Zinn
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History is only a value of relation.
Henry Adams
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Primitive, simplistic anti-Communism is all too often used as a common denominator for diverse efforts to perpetuate one's own power in a democratic system, convert opinions into dogma, and kill off all opposition, even silent.
Eugen Kogon
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The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week's seasickness to experience... [to me] the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion.
Henry Adams
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Charles Beard warned us that governments-inc luding the government of the United States-are not neutral, that they represent the dominant economic interests, and that their Constitutions are intended to serve these interests.
Howard Zinn
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Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.
Carl L. Becker
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In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world.
A. J. P. Taylor
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I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
Henry Adams
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Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.
Henry Adams
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Businesses are no longer receiving the cost savings from outsourcing that they once did.
Gerald Chertavian
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For the truth is that men do not desire to be the Common Man any more than they are the Common Man. They need greatness in others and the occasion to discover the greatness in themselves.
C. V. Wedgwood
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Without war no State could be. All those we know of arose through war, and the protection of their members by armed force remains their primary and essential task. War, therefore, will endure to the end of history, as long as there is a multiplicity of states.
Heinrich von Treitschke
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The cliché is dead poetry. English, being the language of an imaginative race, abounds in clichés, so that English literature is always in danger of being poisoned by its own secretions.
Gerald Brenan
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We should all live as if we were never going to die, for it is the deaths of our friends that hurt us, not our own.
Gerald Brenan
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Civil disobedience is not something outside the realm of democracy. Democracy requires civil disobedience. Without civil disobedience democracy does not exist.
Howard Zinn
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Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.
Alan Bullock
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