Historians From Scotland

"The Supreme Power is not a Mind; not a Force; not a Being, but something higher than a Being; something for which we have no words, something for which we have no ideas."

"Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought nothing out but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. London turns dirt into gold. Rome turned gold into dirt."

"We live between two worlds; we soar in the atmosphere; we creep upon the soil; we have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds. There can be but one explanation of this fact. We are passing from the animal into a higher form, and the drama of this planet is in its second act."

"A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality."

"In Europe itself it is not probable that war will ever absolutely cease until science discovers some destroying force so simple in its administration, so horrible in its effects, that all art, all gallantry, will be at an end, and battles will be massacres which the feelings of mankind will be unable to endure."

"There is a certain class of people who prefer to say that their fathers came down in the world through their own follies rather than to boast that they rose in the world through their own industry and talents."

"Our enlightened posterity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep, just as we look upon cannibals."

"If Christianity were true religious persecution would become a pious and charitable duty: if God designs to punish men for their opinions it would be an act of mercy to mankind to extinguish such opinions. By burning the bodies of those who diffuse them many souls would be saved that would otherwise be lost, and so there would be an economy of torment in the long run. It is therefore not surprising that enthusiasts should be intolerant."

"As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity."

"Doubt is the offspring of knowledge: the savage never doubts at all."

"Open the book of universal history at what period we may, it is always the India trade which is the cause of internal industry and foreign negotiation."

"All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe."

"If we look into ourselves we discover propensities which declare that our intellects have arisen from a lower form; could our minds be made visible we should find them tailed."

"It may safely be asserted that the art of war will soon be reduced to a simple question of expenditure and credit, and that the largest purse will be the strongest arm."

"The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food. Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness."

"The essence of religion is inertia; the essence of science is change. It is the function of the one to preserve, it is the function of the other to improve. If, as in Egypt, they are firmly chained together, either science will advance, in which case the religion will be altered, or the religion will preserve its purity, and science will congeal."

"And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds."

"It is a sure criterion of the civilisation of ancient Egypt that the soldiers did not carry arms except on duty, and that the private citizens did not carry them at all."

"In the first days Of my distracting grief, I found myself As women wish to be who love their lords."

"I'll woo her as the lion wooes his brides."

"My name is Norval; on the Grampian hills My father feeds his flocks; a frugal swain, Whose constant cares were to increase his store, And keep his only son, myself, at home."

"A rude and boisterous captain of the sea."

"Like Douglas conquer, or like Douglas die."

"Prae aliis itaque Britanniae scriptoribus, solus mihi Gildas...imitabilis esse videtur."

"Considering the avowed purpose of his work, which is rather hortatory than historical, we are fortunate indeed to be given so much first-hand information by this embittered preacher."

"Gildas's On the Ruin of Britain is not an attempt at a reasoned account of his times: it is...a brilliant vitriolic diatribe on the wickedness of all things British and the virtue of all things Roman. It is a sermon, obscure, learned and immensely difficult to read, almost as though the writer's pen were choked with the fury of his words."

"Tum erumpens grex catulorum de cubili laeanae barbarae, tribus, ut lingua eius exprimitur, cyulis, nostra longis navibus."

"Igitur rursum miserae mittentes epistolas reliquiae ad Agitium Romanae potestatis virum, hoc modo loquentes: "Agitio ter consuli gemitus Britannorum"; et post pauca querentes: "repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur"."

"Et tacens vetustos immanium tyrannorum annos, qui in aliis longe positis regionibus vulgati sunt, it ut Porphyrius rabidus orientalis adversus ecclesiam canis dementiae suae ac vanitatis stilo hoc etiam adnecteret: "Britannia", inquiens, "fertilis provincia tyrannorum"."

"[Descriptio Britanniae] Campis late pansis collibusque amoeno situ locatis, praepollenti culturae aptis, montibus alternandis animalium pastibus maxime covenientibus, quorum diversorum colorum flores humanis gressibus pulsati non indecentem ceu picturam eisdem imprimebant, electa veluti sponsa monilibus diversis ornata, fontibus lucidis crebris undis niveas veluti glareas pellentibus, pernitidisque rivis leni murmure serpentibus ipsorumque in ripis accubantibus suavis soporis pignus praetendentibus, et lacubus frigidum aquae torrentem vivae exundantibus irrigua."

"Interea glaciali figore rigenti insulae et velut longiore terrarum secessu soli visibili non proximae verus ille non de firmamento solum temporali sed de summa etiam caelorum arce tempora cuncta excedente universo orbi praefulgidum sui coruscum ostendens, tempore, ut scimus, summo Tiberii Caesaris, quo absque ullo impedimento delatoribus militum eiusdem, radios suos primum indulget, id est sua praecepta, Christus."

"Interea non cessant uncinata nudorum tela, quibus miserrimi cives de muris tracti solo allidebantur."

"These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range of our hearing; and just as the touch of button on our stereo will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to heart."

"The chief aim of education is to show you, after you make a livelihood, how to enjoy living; and you can live longest and best and most rewardingly by attaining and preserving the happiness of learning."

"Nobody has ever thought himself to death. The chief danger confronting us is not age. It is laziness, sloth, routine, stupidity, — forcing their way in like wind through the shutters, seeping into the cellar like swamp water."

"Rome grew powerful through her military and political genius; and then, from Greece, she learnt to live the life of the mind. We have grown powerful through our scientific and industrial genius. The only way in which we can justify that power, use it for our own lasting benefit, and contribute something permanent to the development of the human race, is to understand and spread a system of noble spiritual ideals. Some of these we ourselves are working out. Many others we derive from Christianity. And many—in art and philosophy and literature—we have received from Greco-Roman civilization, as a priceless legacy. The real duty of man is not to extend his power or multiply his wealth beyond his needs, but to enrich and enjoy his only imperishable possession: his soul."

"Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"The aim of those who try to control thought is always the same. They find one single explanation of the world, one system of thought and action that will (they believe) cover everything; and then they try to impose that on all thinking people."

"An intimate acquaintance with the languages of those nations who once possessed a high share of human greatness and felicity, is well calculated both to engender and preserve a love of freedom. Mr Ferguson, accordingly, was a zealous and enlightened friend of whatever tended to promote the advancement, and diffuse the principles of national liberty. Attached, like his father, and all the clergy of Scotland, to those maxims of ecclesiastical policy that produced the Reformation, and those ideas of political right, that, by justifying the revolution, endeared the House of Brunswick, and legalised their claims to the throne of these kingdoms, he is said even then to have prided himself on being a “constitutional Whig.”"

"Theory consists in referring particular operations to the principles, or general laws, under which they are comprehended; or in referring particular effects to the causes from which they proceed."

"In every commercial state, notwithstanding any pretension to equal rights, the exaltation of a few must depress the many."

"When Adam Ferguson summed up such teaching by defining the savage as a man who did not yet know property (1767/73:136), and when Adam Smith remarked that `nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures or natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that is yours' (1776/1976:26), they expressed what, in spite of recurrent revolts by rapacious or hungry bands, had for practically two millennia been the view of the educated. As Ferguson put it, `It must appear very evident, that property is a matter of progress' (ibid)."

"Man, in his animal capacity, is qualified to subsist in every climate."

"The history of mankind is confined within a limited period, and from every quarter brings an intimation that human affairs have had a beginning."

"…if we intend to pursue the history of our species in its further attainments, we may soon enter on subjects which will confine our observation to more narrow limits. The genius of political wisdom and civil arts appears to have chosen his seats in particular tracts of the earth, and to have selected his favourites in particular races of men."

"We are fond of distinctions; we place ourselves in opposition, and quarrel under the denominations of faction and party, without any material subject of controversy."

"Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed or quarrelled, in troops and companies."

"Men are to be estimated, not from what they know, but from what they are able to perform."

"Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design."