historians-from-scotland

"He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny found only in Christianity."

"Mentitur veros facies tibi picta colores, Et speculi mendax te tibi imago referit. In digito annellus mentitur aëneus aurum, Mentitur gemmam vitrea gemma probam. Quicquid contigerit re cum mendacia discat, Miremur linguam dicere falsa tuam?"

"Frustra ego te laudo, frustra me, Zoile, laedis: Nemo mihi credit, Zoile, nemo tibi."

"... whether the natives of India are to be treated as equal to Europeans in all respects . Under present circumstances it cannot fail to interest many to dissect the writings of one of the most prominent members of the native community , that we may lay bare and understand his motives and modes of action , and thus ascertain how far Europeans were justified in refusing to submit to the jurisdiction of natives in criminal actions."

"After the Civil War any well-established village in New England or the northern Middle West could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats."

"We all invent ourselves as we go along, and a great man's myths about himself merely tend to stick better than most."

"The combination of a profound hatred of war and militarism with an innocent delight in playing soldiers is one of these apparent contradictions of American life that one has to accept."

"It is, I have been told, one of the most formidable of Chinese imprecations to wish that your enemy lived "in interesting times." We live in very interesting times; times not to be made better by any simple formula. Understanding each other is not enough, but it is an indispensable beginning."

"For Americans, war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill a luxury like Mah-Jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary period, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which is likely to be the more ominous for the Axis—an American decision that this war is sport, or that it is business."

"If we are to consider what holds the South back from the modern world in so graceless and often base a way, we must allow for the survival of the Confederate legend. This legend is now less an heroic memory than poison in the blood; it recalls less Chancellorsville, or even Nashville, than Oxford, Mississippi, with Ross Barnett as the poor man's Jefferson Davis."

"A country has the kind of army its total ethos, its institutions, resources, habits of peaceful life, make possible to it. The American army is the army of a country which is law-respecting without being law-abiding. It is the army of a country which, having lavish natural wealth provided for it and lavish artificial wealth created by its own efforts, is extravagant and wasteful. It is the army of a country in which melodramatic pessimism is often on the surface but below it is the permanent optimism of a people that has licked a more formidable enemy than Germany or Japan, primitive North America. It is the army of a country whose national motto has been "root, hog, or die." When convinced that death is the alternative, the hog roots."

"American social fences have to be continually repaired; in England they are like wild hedges; they grow if left alone."

"The basic Canadian relationship is not either with the United States or with the United Kingdom, but with the world of the hydrogen bomb. The very fact that Canada is now one of the treasure-houses of the world makes the naive isolationism of the inter-war years...impossible. A uranium-producing country cannot be neutral."

"London's a dull town," said Magnus, ... "It's easy to live in," he said, "but the air's flat and stale and the people half-hearted. There's nothing to do there. You can make love without trouble or meaning, or get mildly drunk, or extract second-hand emotions from the cinema, or put your mind to sleep on a dance-floor, or play bridge, or throw yourself in front of a train on the Underground. There are forty ways of escaping from consciousness. But I want something more exciting than that."

"I find it difficult to recognize people. Human beings are so much alike."

"There won’t be any revolution in America," said Isadore. Nikitin agreed. "The people are all too clean. They spend all their time changing their shirts and washing themselves. You can’t feel fierce and revolutionary in a bathroom."

"To every man of our Saxon race endowed with full health and strength, there is committed, as if it were the price he pays for these blessings, the custody of a restless demon, for which he is doomed to find ceaseless excitement, either in honest work, or some less profitable or more mischievous occupation. Countless have been the projects devised by the wit of man to open up for this fiend fields of exertion great enough for the absorption of its tireless energies, and none of them is more hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restlessness be sobered by the immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have faded away ; and hence, instead of dreading the languor of inaction, it will have to summon all its resources of promptness and activity to get over any considerable portion of the ground within the short space allotted to the life of man."

"Primary sources did not come into existence to satisfy the curiosity of historians. They derive 'natural', 'organically', as it were, or, more straightforwardly, 'in the ordinary course of events', from human beings and groups of human beings, in the past society being studied, living their lives, worshipping, decision-making, adjudicating, fornicating, going about their business or fulfilling their vocations, recording, noting, communicating, as they go, very occasionally, perhaps, with an eye on the future, but generally in accordance with immediate needs and purposes. The technical skills of the historian lie in sorting these matters out, in understanding how and why a particular source came into existence, how relevant it is to the topic under investigation and, obviously, the particular codes or language in accordance with which the particular source comes into being as a concrete artefact."

"History is the study of the human past, through the systematic analysis of the primary sources, and the bodies of knowledge arising from that study, and, therefore, is the human past as it is known from the work of historians. The human past enfolds so many periods and cultures that history can no more form one unified body of knowledge than can the natural sciences. The search for universal meaning or universal explanations is, therefore, a futile one. History is about finding things out, and solving problems, rather than about spinning narratives or telling stories."

"If the historian finds himself resorting to metaphor or cliché, that may well be a warning that things have not been sufficiently worked out, and substantiated, to be conveyed in plain simple prose."

"Historians do not, as too many of my colleagues keep mindlessly repeating, “reconstruct” the past. What historians do is produce knowledge about the past, or, with respect to each individual, fallible historian, produce contributions to knowledge about the past. Thus the best and most concise definition of history is: “The bodies of knowledge about the past produced by historians, together with everything that is involved in the production, communication of, and teaching about that knowledge."

"The insistence that language determines ideas, and is itself a system arising from the existing power structure in society, is as grandiose a piece of speculative thought as ever dreamed up by Hegel or Nietzche."

"Society has a right to demand from historians accounts which can, if so desired, be used in trying to understand the evolution of political ideas or institutions, or the origins of the many conflicts throughout the world, or to gain the necessary contextual information for enjoying more fully a painting or a poem or some favourite tourist attraction. Those seeking such understandings will not be helped by some speculative theory about the need to replace humanism with radical ideology, or of the inescapability of their situation within language, but will want to feel that the explanations, interpretations, and information they are provided with are based on serious study of the evidence; and it will do them no harm at all if they are also made aware that all sources are fallible, that all study of them must be carried out in accordance with the strictest principles, and that there are always things which we do not know with any certainty."

"For most countries involved in modern war the experience has resulted in, among other things, the testing of the cruder fallacies of economic liberalism, the testing of human reluctance to exploit the full potential of science and technology, and the testing of the general inadequacy of social provisions of the weaker members of the community: looking for the moment only at the broad perspective, one can detect change towards management of the economy, towards a more science-conscious society and towards a welfare state."

"In 1841, Mountstuart Elphinstone, the first Governor of the Bombay Presidency, wrote in his History of India: “No set of people among the Hindus are so depraved as the dregs of our great towns. The villagers are everywhere amiable, affectionate to their families, kind to their neighbours…. The Hindus are mild and gentle people…. Their superiority in purity of manners is not flattering to our self-esteem.”"

"The common origin of the Sanscrit language with those of the west leaves no doubt that there was once a connection between the nations by whom they are used; but it proves nothing regarding the place where such a connection subsisted, nor about the time, (…) To say that it spread from a central point is a gratuitous assumption."

"Neither in the Vedas, nor in any book .. .is there any allusion to a prior residence ... out of India ... There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one."

"In the Surva Siddhanta is contained a system of trigonometry which not only goes beyond anything known to the Greeks, but involves theorem which were not discovered in Europe till two centuries ago."

"There is no question of the superiority of the Hindus over their rivals in the perfection to which they brought the science. Not only is Aryabhatta superior to Diaphantus (as is shown by his knowledge of the resolution of equations involvll1g several unknown quantities, and in general method ofresolvll1g all indetermll1ate problems of at least the first degree), but he and his successors press hard upon the discoveries of algebraists who lived almost in our own time!"

"It is opposed to their foreign origin, that neither in the code of Manu nor I believe in the Vedas, nor in any book that is certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India. Even mythology goes no further than the Himalayan chain in which is fixed, the habitation of Gods. It is unthinkable and beyond all canons of logic and common sense that the Hindus had forgotten their original home even at the time of the composition of the earliest Vedas. Christians look to Jerusalem for the origin of their religion, Muslims to Arabia, and Jews to Palestine, but the Hindus have all their sacred places within India itself. If they really had come from outside India, they should have some place of pilgrimage like Mecca or Benares. "To say that it (emigration) spread from a central point is a gratuitous presumption and even contrary to analogy for emigration and civilization have not spread in a circle but from east to west.""

"Where, also, could the central point be, from which a language could spread over India, Greece and Italy, and yet leave Chaldaea, Syria and Arabia untouched? The question, therefore, is still open. There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present."

"Such arguments were by no means uncontested. In 1841, Mountstuart Elphinstone objected that "it is opposed to their foreign origin that neither in the code [of Manu] nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any book . . . is there any allusion to a prior residence or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India." Responding to some of the arguments that had been brought forward, he argued that "to say that [the original language] spread from a central point is a gratuitous assumption, and even contrary to language; for emigration and civilization have not spread in a circle." As far as he was concerned, "the question, therefore, is still open. There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one, and as little for denying that they may have done so before the earliest trace of their records or tradition" (97-98)."

"Lord Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859) in comparing the ancient Greeks with the ancient Hindus, says: "Their (Hindus) general learning was more considerable; and in the knowledge of the being and nature of God, they were already in possession of a light which was but faintly perceived even by the loftiest intellects in the best days of Athens.""

"To the aboriginal races alone can we appear in the light of friends and deliverers. They have yet to start on the path of progress. It remains for us to decide whether that path is to lead them to Hinduism, or to the purer faith and civilisation which we represent."

"Scholarship is warmed with the holy flame of Christian zeal."

"‘In ancient times the lower portion of the river seems to have borne the name of its confluent the Saraswati or Sarsuti, which joins the main stream in Patiala territory. It then possessed the dimensions of an important channel . . . At present, however, every village through which the stream passes has diverted a portion of its waters for irrigation, no less than 10,000 acres being supplied from this source in Ambala District alone . . . During the lower portion of its course, in Sirsa District, the bed of the Ghaggar is dry from November to June, affording a cultivable surface for rich crops of rice and wheat.’"

"The whole conception of Islam is that of a church either actively militant or conclusively triumphant forcibly converting the world, or ruling the stiff-necked unbeliever with a rod of iron."

"The Hindus attained a very high proficiency in arithmetic and algebra independently of any foreign influence." The romance of the composition of Lilavati - the standard Hindu textbook on Arithmetic by Bhaskaracharya - is very interesting and charming. It deals not only with the basic elements of the science of arithmetic but also with questions of interest, of barter, ofpermutatlOns and combinations, and of mensuration. Bhaskaracharya knew the law of gravitation. The Surya Siddhanta is based on a system of trigonometry. Professor Wallace says: "In fact it is founded on a geometrical theorem, which was not known to the geometricians of Europe before the time of Vieta, about two hundred years ago. And it employs the sine of arcs, a thing unknown to the Greeks." The 47th proposition of Book I of Euclid, which is ascribed to Pythagoras was known long ago to the Hindus and must have been learnt from them by Pythagoras."

"Upon our annexation of the Punjab the fanatic fury, which had formerly spent itself upon the Sikhs, was transferred to their successors. Hindus and English were alike infidels in the eyes of the Sittana Host, and as such were to be exterminated by the sword. The disorders as ‘ which we had connived at, or at least viewed with indifference, upon the Sikh frontier, now descended as a bitter inheritance to ourselves, Their followers were found preaching sedition in different parts of the country so far apart as Rajshahiin Bengal, Patna in Bihar and the Punjab frontier. Throughout the whole period the fanatics kept the border tribes in a state of chronic hostility to the British Power."

"... the entry ‘Saraswati (Sarsuti)’, defined as a ‘sacred river of the Punjab, famous in the early Brahmanical annals’. We learn that the river rises ‘in the low hills of Sirmur State, emerges upon the plain at Zadh Budri [Ad Badri], a place esteemed sacred by all Hindus’, and, before joining the Ghaggar, ‘passes by the holy town of Thanesar and the numerous shrines of the Kuruksetra, a tract celebrated as a centre of pilgrimages, and as the scene of the battle-fields of the Mahabharatha’. The Gazetteer repeats, ‘In ancient times, the united stream below the point of junction appears to have borne the name of Sarsuti, and, undiminished by irrigation near the hills, to have flowed across the Rajputana plains . . .’ ‘Some of the earliest Aryan settlements in India were on the banks of the Saraswati, and the surrounding country has from almost Vedic times been held in high veneration. The Hindus identify the river with Saraswati, the Sanskrit Goddess of Speech and Learning.’"

"Religion and philosophy have been the great contributions of India to the world."

"The grammar of Panini stands supreme among the grammars of the world, alike for its precision of statement, and for its thorough analysis of the roots of the language and of the formative principles of words. By employing an algebraic terminology it attains a sharp succinctness unrivalled in brevity, but at times enigmatical. It arranges, in logical harmony, the whole phenomena, which the Sanskrit language presents, and stands forth as one of the most splendid achievements of human invention and industry. So elaborate is the structure that doubts have arisen whether its complex rules offormation and phonetic change, its polysyllabic derivatives, its ten conjugations with1heir multiform aorists and long array of tenses, could ever have been the spoken language of a people." 29"

"‘In the year A.D. 1000 it [the Sutlej] was a tributary of the Hakra, and flowed in the Eastern Nara . . . Thus the Sutlej or the Hakra—for both streams flowed in the same bed—is probably the lost river of the Indian desert, whose waters made the sands of Bikaner and Sind a smiling garden.’"

"Some questions were raised by journalists in the early Seventies, all over Western Europe, which have never been answered in Britain. If the press is to be owned by private tycoons like Murdoch, or by international conglomerates with many other interests, how is editorial independence to be protected? How is the public, democratic function of the media to be guaranteed while they remain in private hands? In those days, the suggestion that journalists should have entrenched and specified rights over the integrity of what they wrote and over who was appointed or elected to be their editor was greeted by the newspaper proprietors as a threat to press liberty worse than that presented by the printing unions. A few experiments in that direction were made, none very encouraging. Yet the whole recent history of Times Newspapers raises that question again in its most acute form: only the journalists – not the readers, not ineffective ‘independent’ directors – can really guarantee the editor’s independence against a proprietor, and then only if their rights are solidly documented. Britain may think it does not need a written constitution, but British newspapers do, and that constitution should be written into law. After reading Good Times, Bad Times, nobody could believe that the present system, with the Government attaching a string of ad hoc conditions designed by itself to a given newspaper sale, is in any way effective."

"All the same, conservatism still eludes satisfactory definition even as an aim. If it were just a style, as some writers seem to assume, the Soviet regime would qualify without difficulty, but all states which endeavour to avoid political change will not be allowed by the nouveaux philosophes of the right, wherever in the world, to be conservative. ‘Rightism’ will not do either: the Nazi programme of destroying an entire social order and its institutions, though supported initially by many German conservatives, drove some of them in the end to conspiratorial resistance."

"Public opinion is broadly on our side, and the Social Democrats in particular believe that Europe will never work without Britain. So far, so good. But the real question is how hard the West Germans can fight for our interests against possible French resistance. And here, to begin with, there is a fearsome difficulty which forms the very foundation of the Grand Coalition. That astonishing alliance between Right and Left, between men as far apart politically as Willy Brandt and Franz-Josef Strauss, rests heavily on the basis of better relations with France. ... And if Bonn now quarrels with Paris over British, entry, its justification would be destroyed. Strauss, Rainer Barzel, Freiherr von Guttenberg and the other right-wingers might well then withdraw their support for Willy Brandt's Eastern policy and demand a return to cold-war rigidity. This may prove a fatal weakness, if France takes a strong stand against British entry. The Government can afford an argument, or energetic persuasion on our behalf, but not a head-on collision."

"We do not even know if the Soviet Union has won a battle. Staggered by the total Czechoslovak resistance and the hurricane of world criticism, the Soviet leaders seem on the brink of partial and disorderly retreat. Mr Dubcek is back in some sort of circulation, and a chink of hope seems to be opening. But we do know, whatever happens, that the Soviet Union is losing a world. What is being done to Czechoslovakia is a crime as appalling as that which was done to Hungary 12 years ago. But the disaster is even huger. From now on, the Soviet Union ceases to be the leader of world Communism in any effective sense. The passionate, stumbling march of millions of people across the earth towards justice goes on, through revolution here and through solemn parliamentary succession there. But the Soviet Union remains behind, leader now only of a humiliated and embittered corner of Europe which seems, today, to have nothing much to offer the human race."

"There is fairly general agreement that the career advantages of 'the tie' are decreasing fast. In merchant banking, the Army, the foreign service, they survive, but in many jobs the boss has no special taste for public-school boys. In some, he would even hesitate to hire them. This problem is now much more the problem of Oxbridge advantage. Some feel that the blow must be directed not at the public schools but at their connection with "the educational establishment", the staffing of universities. The public-school values might be lost, but are they valuable? Those, who believe in them feel that they train the individual to take responsibility, that they teach a sense of the public as opposed to the selfish interest. Those who have their doubts say that these values are not really individualist but collectivist, the values of a conforming and separate upper crust which only add up to the techniques of tact needed by any authoritarian group. Modern society needs real individualists, moral independence and adaptability, of a kind which the old training for an Army officer or district officer did not have to provide. And there is the objection, growing out of a peculiarly English brand of socialism, to any total environment which takes moral training out of the hands of the family and' offers it to an institution. There are signs, anyway, that the current demand for boarding school education has less and less to do with those traditional values, more and more to do. with plain social success. One headmaster says that parents' motives in sending sons to his school are "basically snob"."

"The emergence of Dr Kiesinger, Inoffensive and charming in his own person, is another sign of paralysis within the Christian Democrats [of ]. Deadlock between the party leaders at Bonn was too hard, personal hatreds too hot, for any of the men at court to stand a chance of succeeding Chancellor Erhard. So a satrap from the provinces was called. For those who called him, foreign reactions to his less-than-immaculate past counted far less than the fact that in West Germany Dr Kiesinger is respected, popular and uncommitted. Dr Kiesinger is 62, with the step of a statesman and the looks of an actor. As Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, he has been solidly successful gathering Christian Democratic support from the Swabian Hills and the clean new factories around Stuttgart. Since 1945 he has made no political blunders. And yet, with all his qualities, there is something missing. He is handsome, but placid. He is the nineteenth-century orator of golden eloquence, rather than the twentieth-century master of the mass rally or the fireside chat. He is an elegant debater, but thin-skinned when it comes to unkind heckling. Everybody likes him, but nobody seems to be afraid of him. Dr Kiesinger seems a tittle too nice to lead the riven Christian Democrats as firmly as they must be led. He is no fighter. He is 'Gentleman George,' or, perhaps, Ferdinand the Bull."

"Conservatism, it should not be necessary to say, is the creed of social unity and is entitled to say so. When the horse obeys the rider’s touch on the reins, that is – for a conservative – unity. When the horse proposes a trot back to the stable, at a moment when the rider proposes a canter to the battlefield that is divisiveness and in the ensuing contest of wills the rider may fall off. One cavalry unit has, for the moment, ceased to exist. It ought to follow, but apparently does not, that when a right-wing government contrives to heighten social divisions rather than to obscure them, its adversaries should be hugely entertained and encouraged."