Historians From England

"A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: "If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!""

"God heard the embattled nations sing and shout "Gott strafe England" and "God save the King!" God this, God that, and God the other thing – "Good God!" said God, "I've got my work cut out!""

"It did not last: the devil, shouting "Ho. Let Einstein be," restored the status quo."

"The better production of our generation has been mainly lyrical and it has been widely diffused."

"Little droplets of poetic essence."

"It is galling to see such mendacious hypocrites as Kennedy and Biden at the Senate Judiciary Committee sitting in judgment on distinguished jurists."

"Like all fads, corporate governance has its zealots"

"Greed has been severely underestimated and denigrated – unfairly so, in my opinion."

"Those who would retain his services should confine him to subjects better suited…to his sniggering, puerile, defamatory and cruelly limited talents."

"A jumped-up little twerp [and a] prime candidate for exorcism"

"[The] swarming, grunting masses of jackals..."

"An overgenerous reinsurance policy for an underachieving people."

"All those pent-up forces of envy and disbelief finally showed their true colours instead of masquerading in the deceitful fashion they have used since I took over at Argus... there is something about the Canadian mentality that cannot stand an unbroken string of successes, unless it comes after a long life or after evident ordeal. No one begrudged Terry Fox getting the Order of Canada and no one boos any more when E.P. Taylor wins the Queen's Plate. But present Canadians with too much success too soon and it's just unbearable. That's how it works in this country."

"The bedraggled warhorse of American blowhardism."

"Black condemned the 1966 decision made by Harold Wilson to pull out of the Persian Gulf and scrap the Royal Navy's aircraft carriers. He regarded the resignation of Christopher Mayhew, Minister of Defence for the Navy as "the last resonance of good sense in that country until Maggie Thatcher came in.""

"Perhaps Archbishop Paul-Émile Léger suffered from what they call in French a taste for the sensational. He was like one of those matadors who, as the cadence of the oles gets more and more rapid, are always trying to find something more daring to do. He grew hasty in his desire to produce new spectacles and maybe did a few ill-considered things. But on the whole I remain impressed with him."

"Having read all the other works on the same subject, including M. Rumilly's recently published effort; having spent innumerable days and evenings in the dusty and poorly-illuminated archival chaos of Maurice Duplessis's basement, and having conscientiously revised the original version of this thesis in conformity with many objections, some of which were uninformed and unjust, I am unpretentiously conscious of presenting herewith the definitive work in its field, in any language."

"The present government of Quebec is the most financially and intellectually corrupt in the history of the province. There are the shady deals, brazenly conducted, and the broken promises, most conspicuously that of last October to retain Bill 63... The government dragged out the ancient and totally fictitious spectre of assimilation to justify Bill 22 and its rejection of the right of free choice in education, its its reduction of English education to the lowest echelon of ministerial whim, its assault upon freedom of expression through the regulation of the internal and external language of businesses and other organizations, and its creation of a fatuous new linguistic bureaucracy that will conduct a system of organized denunciation, harassment, and patronage... There is a paralytic social sickness in Quebec. In all this debate, not a single French Quebecker has objected to Bill 22 on the grounds that it was undemocratic or a reduction of liberties exercised in the province. The Quebec Civil Liberties Union, founded by Pierre Trudeau, from which one might have expected such sentiments, has instead demanded the abolition of English education, and this through the spokemanship of Jean-Louis Roy, who derives his income from McGill University.... It is clear that Mr. Bourassa... is now going to try to eliminate the Parti Quebecois by a policy of gradual scapegoatism directed against the non-French elements in the province... The English community here, still deluding itself with the illusion of Montreal as an incomparably fine place to live, is leaderless and irrelevant, except as the hostage of a dishonest government. Last month one of the most moderate ministers, Guy St-Pierre, told an English businessman's group, 'If you don't like Quebec, you can leave it.' With sadness but with certitude, I accept that choice."

"Bud (McDougald) was a true Darwinist, so in his view, when he died--to the winner should go the spoils. It was a free-for-all. A lot of people, Nelson Davis for one, used to ask me what Bud would have thought of the somewhat unseemly scramble that went on after he died. I suspect it would have flattered him. Had he wanted an orderly succession, he would have organized one. He certainly told Monte and me that he wanted us to take over--but he told a few other people the same thing. Bud was very skillful at presenting the carrot and making sure it wasn't within anyone's grasp."

"I had never heard of [Walter] Young before, and I do not expect to hear from him again."

"Since biblical times, and probably before, the wealthy have been envied and condemned."

"I tended, even from my early years, to look at the world from a slightly different vantage point. Although I might have had trouble articulating it at the age of 10, I wasn't unduly convinced of the durability of the Anglo-Saxon world as we had come to know it in the postwar period, a world of latter-day materialism advancing around the globe on the wongs of the English language and the American dollar. I had a sneaking suspicion that we were living in a bit of a fool's paradise..."

"We must express the view, based on our empirical observations, that a substantial number of journalists are ignorant, lazy, opinionated, and intellectually dishonest. The profession is heavily cluttered with aged hacks toiling through a miasma of mounting decrepitude and often alcoholism, and even more so with arrogant and abrasive youngsters who substitute 'commitment' for insight."

"Creating simplicity often makes the heart leap; order has been restored, the crooked made straight. But order is understanding that things cannot be made simple, that complexity reigns and must be accepted."

"Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear."

"When virtue is pictured as innocence and innocence equated with childlikeness, the implication is obviously that knowledge and experience are no longer media of goodness, but have become in themselves contaminating. This is a very despairing outlook, in its way as black as Augustine's original sin, for it supposes that original goodness will in all likelihood be defiled…It surrenders the attempt to represent virtue in a mature phase."

"The sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen's club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days."

"Regarding Salman Rushdie, the official reason given was that speaking up for the rights of a writer to free expression would offend some of our members and Fellows and that the RSL is not a political body [...] This attitude produces the odd situation that one of the few places in the UK where a writer can’t express their views is their own Society."

"Our successors (for you and I are now old enough in authorship to use this term) are falling into the same faults as the Roman poets after the Augustan age, and the Italians after the golden season of their poetry. They are overlabouring their productions, and overloading them with ornament, so that all parts are equally prominent, everywhere glare and glitter, and no keeping and no repose. Henry Milman has spoilt his Samor in this way. It is full of power and of beauty, but too full of them."

"That such a writer should have devoted himself to the department of history, which more than any other has been distorted by ignorance, puerility, and dishonesty, I conceive to be one of the happiest facts in English literature, and (though sometimes diverging from his views) in many parts of the following work I have largely availed myself of his researches."

"Began Milman's Latin Christianity. Bating the faults of style, it is most valuable."

"Brilliant and numerous as are the works of the late Dean Milman, it was those only who had the great privilege of his friendship who could fully realise the amazing extent and variety of his knowledge; the calm, luminous, and delicate judgment which he carried into so many spheres; the inimitable grace and tact of his conversation, coruscating with the happiest anecdotes, and the brightest and yet the gentlest humour; and what was perhaps more remarkable than any single faculty, the admirable harmony and symmetry of his mind and character, so free from all the disproportion, and eccentricity, and exaggeration, that sometimes make even genius assume the form of a splendid disease. They can never forget those yet higher attributes, which rendered him so unspeakably reverent to all who knew him well—his fervent love of truth, his wide tolerance, his large, generous, and masculine judgments of men and things; his almost instinctive perception of the good that is latent in each opposing party, his disdain for the noisy triumphs and the fleeting popularity of mere sectarian strife, the fond and touching affection with which he dwelt upon the images of the past, combining, even in extreme old age, with the keenest and most hopeful insight into the progressive movements of his time, and with a rare power of winning the confidence and reading the thoughts of the youngest about him."

"Too fair to worship, too divine to love."

"His intellect may have lacked originality, but he was a pioneer in the study of Sanscrit poetry and in the application of criticism to Jewish history."

"And the cold marble leapt to life a god."

"Milman – read a good deal – more impressed than ever by the contrast between the substance and the style. The substance excellent – the style very much otherwise."

"Ride on, ride on, in majesty! In lowly pomp ride on to die."

"Thou our throbbing flesh hast worn; Thou our mortal griefs hast borne; Thou hast shed the human tear; Jesus, Son of Mary, hear!"

"He is a fine young man: and his powers are very great. They are, however, better fitted for the drama than for narration; the drama admits his favourite strain of composition, and is easier in its structure."

"Death cannot come To him untimely who is fit to die; The less of this cold world, the more of heaven; The briefer life, the earlier immortality."

"Als thai haf wryten and sayd Haf I alle in myn Inglis layd, In symple speche as I couthe, That is lightest in mannes mouthe. I mad noght for no disours, Ne for no seggers, no harpours, Bot for the luf of symple men That strange Inglis can not ken."

"He felle dede doun colde as ony stone."

"No thyng ys to man so dere As wommanys love yn gode manere. A gode womman is mannys blys."

"There ys no solas undyr hevene Of al that a man may nevene That shuld a man so mochë glew As a gode womman that loveth trew."

"And thy traveyle shalt thou sone ende, For to thy long home sone shalt thou wende."

"The range of his sympathies and interests makes Handlyng Synne the best picture of English life before Langland and Chaucer."

"The term philosophy of mind came into currency in the English-speaking world in the 1950's, largely as a description of the debates initiated by Gilbert Ryle's pioneering book The Concept of Mind, published in 1949. Ryle's book was a polemic against the Cartesian idea that mental states are states of an immaterial substance. This polemic, and the ensuing discussion, turned on the question of the reducibility of mental events to behavioral dispositions. Ryle's central argument was that we had misconceived the "logic" of such words as "belief," "sensation," "conscious," etc. He thought that the traditional, Cartesian theory of mind, had "misconstrued the type-distinction between disposition and exercise into its mythical bifurcation of unwitnessable mental causes and their witnessable physical effects" (pg 32). Ryle's attempt to do philosophy of mind as conceptual analysis was founded on the pre-Quinean idea that philosophical puzzles arose out of misunderstandings of the logic of our language."

"To see is one thing; to picture or visualise is another. A person can see things, only when his eyes are open, and when his surroundings are illuminated; but he can have pictures in his mind’s eye, when his eyes are shut and when the world is dark."

"It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts."

"Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable."