9 quotes
I know how unfashionable it is now to acknowledge in life or history any genius loftier than ourselves.
The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time (2002)
War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy.
History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large.
History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.
The Gentle Philosopher (2006)
Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus.
You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.
The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.
The Age of Faith (1950)
History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules; history is baroque.
Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war.
The Gentle Philosopher (2006)
No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.