5 quotes
The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)
Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)
In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men’s behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)
Every historian loves the past or should do. If not, he has mistaken his vocation; but it is a short step from loving the past to regretting that it has ever changed. Conservatism is our greatest trade-risk; and we run psychoanalysts close in the belief that the only "normal" people are those who cause no trouble either to themselves or anybody else.
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)
American statesmen might like some Europeans more than others and even detect quaint resemblances to their own outlook; but they no more committed themselves to a particular group or country than a nineteenth-century missionary committed himself to the African tribe in which he happened to find himself.
The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792-1939 (1957)