Historians From The United States

"I'm a Jewish boy from Jersey. I was born with a strong sense of right and wrong, and a strong sense that the world can be a ludicrous, unfair, inhumane place."

"Washington was the right man at the right time – sometimes he was the first man, but sometimes he simply knew when to ride the crest of a wave or the leading edge of a trend."

"F.Shaw: As prolific as you are, how long did it take you to research and write this book? A.Axelrod: Well over a year. I do my research for one book while I write another—that way I get to read as well as write."

"People might say these (my) books are frivolous, but I don't see them that way. I think they're very impressively designed – just in an unconventional format."

"He (Patton) was tough. War is tough. Leaders have to be tough. He drove his army hard, yes, and he made many enemies among colleagues and subordinates, but he also produced results. He was indeed arrogant, but sometimes a good leader has to be larger than life. … But the fact is: again typically, Patton's admirers are no more specific in their praise than are his disparagers in their criticism."

"In the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was very common for boys and young men to read about the lives of the so-called great men for the purpose of extracting lessons in how to be great themselves in whatever field they chose. I see these books as reviving that tradition by distilling ideas to their essence and putting them in a readily digestible form."

"I mean, if I'm in situations, and I just mean even at dinner or something, I'm with somebody, I'm usually curious, and the conversation will proceed with questions. And I guess it's also because I'm pretty interested in what anybody's doing, whoever I happen to be with."

"The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century."

"Leonardo was not always a giant. He made mistakes. He went off on tangents, literally, pursuing math problems that became time-sucking diversions. Notoriously, he left many of his paintings unfinished, most notably the Adoration of the Magi, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, and the Battle of Anghiari. As a result, there exist now at most fifteen paintings fully or mainly attributable to him. Although generally considered by his contemporaries to be friendly and gentle, Leonardo was at times dark and troubled. His notebooks and drawings are a window into his fevered, imaginative, manic, and sometimes elated mind. Had he been a student at the outset of the twenty-first century, he may have been put on a pharmaceutical regimen to alleviate his mood swings and attention-deficit disorder. One need not subscribe to the artist-as-troubled-genius trope to believe we are fortunate that Leonardo was left to his own devices to slay his demons while conjuring up his dragons."

"For Einstein, as for most people, a belief in something larger than himself became a defining sentiment. It produced in him an admixture of confidence and humility that was leavened by a sweet simplicity. Given his proclivity toward being self-centered, these were welcome graces. Along with his humor and self-awareness, they helped him to avoid the pretense and pomposity that could have afflicted the most famous mind in the world. His religious feelings of awe and humidity also informed his sense of social justice. It impelled him to cringe at trappings of hierarchy or class distinction, to eschew excess consumption and materialism, and to dedicate himself to efforts on behalf of refugees and the oppressed."

"Born and bred a member of the leather-aproned class, Franklin was, at least for most of his life, more comfortable with artisans and thinkers than with the established elite, and he was allergic to the pomp and perks of a hereditary aristocracy. Throughout his life he would refer to himself as "B. Franklin, printer." From these attitudes spring what may be Franklin's most important vision: an American national identity based on the virtues and values of its middle class. Instinctively more comfortable with democracy than were his fellow founders, and devoid of the snobbery that later critics would feel toward his own shopkeeping values, he had faith in the wisdom of the common man and felt that a new nation would draw its strength from what he called "the middling people." Through his self-improvement tips for cultivating personal virtues and his civic-improvement schemes for furthering the common good, he helped to create, and to celebrate, a new ruling class of ordinary citizens."

"It certainly is true that a lot of really driven people are driven because they're harnessing the demons of their childhood"

"The Saturday arguments about photography as a machine art are answered by the best photographers. "If the camera were a machine!" Berenice Abbott said, "with the precision and the flexibility, the accommodation and power of machines as we know them today!" And "Our lighting has not been begun," she said. "We need a light as good as sunlight-better than sunlight.""

"Jason Scott is an arrogant, self-impressed idiot who thinks he's god's gift to techies because he remembers "the golden days" of BBS's."

"Neutral Point of View is a doctrine about how Wikipedia articles should be written. Like wikipedia itself, it is a great idea in theory. In application, of course, it turns into yet another hammer for wonks and whackjobs to beat each other and innocent bystanders."

"“Google is a library or archive like a supermarket is a food museum.”"

"So you can be a historian and also be an asshole."

"[Yahoo!] found the way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse."

"People say they have to express their emotions. I’m sick of that. Photography doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see."

"Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself."

"I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism—real life—the now."

"The Baroness was like Jesus Christ and Shakespeare all rolled into one and perhaps she was the most influential person to me in the early part of my life."

"I wanted to photograph this subject because the signs’ shrieking blatancy literally cried out for a visual record. To my mind the faded, yellowing paper and the red paint were not particularly paint,able. In black and white the signs shouted, clamored for attention, in visual anarchy. At the same time, the shrewd business sense which plastered them solid over the entire window area produced, as it were by chance, an esthetic by-product: the whole has homogeneity and variety of texture, simultaneously, which give the picture interest."

"Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage: a myriad-faceted picture containing the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture."

"A photographer's best work is, alas, generally done for himself."

"He was an excellent disciplinarian, a splendid teacher, and a man looking for the good in everybody, which he invariably found and brought out. Great in his goodness of character and life, and of charming personality, he left a lasting impress on the annals of this institution."

"Books are the tools of both teacher and pupil. A library is perhaps the most important adjunct of instruction. It is open to all and is used by all. In every department of science throughout the world the keenest intellects are at work, seeking for solutions to the unending series of problems that present themselves in the physical and natural world . 'Light, more light,' said the dying philosopher, and the longing of the world is but the echo of his last faint cry. To do our duty and to give reply to the many demands made upon us requires all the light and all the experience of other minds, wheresoever they may be found."

"The sky is a-going to fall, I must go and tell the King."

"...he must need wish in a hurry; and wish he did, that the black pudding may come off his nose."

"For out of every hole the rats came tumbling."

"Woe worth you, Molly Whuppie! never you come again Twice yet, carle, quoth she, I'll come to Spain."

"Fee, fi, fo, fum I smell the blood of some earthly one."

"But the Harp called out quite loud: Master! Master!"

"Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he alive or be he dead I'll have his bones to grind my bread."

"My man is an ogre and there is nothing he likes better than boys broiled on toast."

"You don't know what these beans are, said the man [that Jack meets]. If you plant them overnight, by morning they grew right up to the sky."

"There once was upon a time a poor widow who had an only son Jack, and a cow called Milky-White."

"Kind sir, if the truth I must tell, At the sign of Basin of Water I dwell."

"Out the Old Woman jumped (of the window). And whether she broke her neck in the fall; or ran into the wood and was lost there...or taken up by a constable to the House of Correction for the vagrant she was I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her."

"When the pig saw what he [the wolf] was about, he hung on a pot full of water, and made a blazing fire...and in fell the wolf..."

"Well, he [the wolf] huffed, and he puffed, and he puffed, and he puffed and he puffed and huffed; but he could not get the house down."

"Little pig, little pig, let me come in. To which the pig answered: Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin. The wolf answered to that, Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow the house down."

"Turn again Whittington, Thrice Mayor of London"

"Who says that English folk have no fairy-tales of their own?"

"Perhaps the best known, and certainly the most vaunted, "discovery" of modern public opinion research is the indifference and ignorance of a majority of the electorate in western democracies."

"And nothing inhibited fourth-century orators in the assembly and the law-courts from indulging in savage slander, without a touch of humour in it."

"In Rome much pamphleteering took the form of verses and songs, circulated orally, or of libelli , defamatory placards or broadsheets (whence our word "libel")."

"A genuinely political society, in which discussion and debate are an essential technique, is a society full of risks."

"Historical explanation is not identical with moral judgment."

"" man is by nature designed to live in the polis, the highest form of koinonia, community; that is man's end or goal if he achieves the full potentiality of his nature."