Carl Becker Quotes

#1. Carl Becker has defined a professor as a man who thinks otherwise; a scholar is a man who otherwise thinks.

Randall Jarrell

#2. The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.

Carl L. Becker

#3. One night, I drink too many toasts with vodka, and once in my blameless, virtuous life, I wind up getting sick in a decorative urn. The price? My sister's eternal condemnation." "Not condemnation. But eternal teasing? Definitely.

Claudia Gray

#4. Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

Cesare Pavese

#5. Generally speaking, men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept

Carl L. Becker

#6. My philosophy is not a bean-counting, accounting 'look at this.' It is a philosophy that smaller government is better government, and government that is closer to the people is best of all.

John Bolton

#7. History is the memory of things said and done.

Carl L. Becker

#8. Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.

Carl Lotus Becker

#9. He frowns. A dance with the carnivorous Felicity? Why? Has she eaten all the other available gentlemen?

Libba Bray

#10. A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works.

William Morris

#11. Reason may be employed to support faith as well as to destroy it.

Carl Lotus Becker

#12. No class of Americans, so far as I know, has ever objected ... to any amount of governmental meddling if it appeared to benefit that particular class.

Carl L. Becker

#13. God would not bring you through a Red Sea and turn around and allow you to perish in a fish pond.

Johnnie Dent Jr.

#14. The middle years of life come on like thunder.

Nellie L. McClung

#15. Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.

Carl Lotus Becker

#16. No, moral conscience is one thing, the law is another. We have to hold onto this difference.

Rocco Buttiglione

#17. Virginia was in fact a landowning aristocracy, without nobility or merchant class, or any considerable small peasant farming class; and the other Southern colonies, except North Carolina, were on the whole similar to Virginia in these respects.

Carl L. Becker

#18. Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.

Carl Lotus Becker

#19. All historians, even the most scientific, have bias, if in no other sense than the determination not to have any.

Carl L. Becker

#20. Power and position often make a man trifle with the truth.

George A. Smith

#21. The origin of corruption in politics is surely in the thought that you are the bearer of ultimate virtue.

B.W. Powe

#22. There are writers who can show you the excellence of their brains and writers who show you the depths of their souls: I don't know any writer who does both at the same time as brilliantly as Roxane Gay.

Elizabeth McCracken

#23. We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.

Carl Lotus Becker

#24. History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor.

Carl L. Becker

#25. Serious thinkers are few, and the world is ruled by crude ideas.

Carl Lotus Becker

#26. To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false, is essentially a meaningless question.

Carl L. Becker

#27. All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

Carl Lotus Becker

#28. a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress ... until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known

Carl Becker

#29. Corporations have at different times been so far unable to distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of lying that their freedom has to be curbed.

Carl L. Becker

#30. The history that lies inert in unread books does no work in the world.

Carl Becker