Herbert Butterfield Quotes

#1. The grass and the rivers and the stones and women and horses and more Stars and men and clouds and birds and trees came dancing through the afterbirth of the Mare,

Catherynne M Valente

#2. In the last resort, sheer insight is the greatest asset of all.

Herbert Butterfield

#3. We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.

Nelson Mandela

#4. If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.

Herbert Butterfield

#5. The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

Herbert Butterfield

#6. It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.

Herbert Butterfield

#7. But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness - each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked - each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.

Herbert Butterfield

#8. I do believe it was a blind threat, like the one you give children with full knowledge that it floated into one ear and straight out the other waving goodbye on its way into forgetfulness.

Rachel Van Dyken

#9. The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.

Herbert Butterfield

#10. November 11, 1802, I arrived at Judge Patterson's at Lisle. This respectable family treated me with every mark of distinction and friendship, and likewise all the people did the same. I really want for words to express my gratitude.

Deborah Sampson

#11. Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world ... than those who are forever thinking that life is in vain, unless one can. do big things.

Herbert Butterfield

#12. Perhaps history is a thing that would stop happening if God held His breath, or could be imagined as turning away to think of something else.

Herbert Butterfield

#13. Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art ... I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.

Quentin Crisp

#14. The is always much to be said for not attempting more than you can do and for making a certainty of what you try. But this principle, like others in life and war, has it exceptions.

Winston Churchill

#15. Most marketers think there's a concept called a product life cycle. Once you realize that the world is organized by jobs that need to be done, you understand that product life cycles don't exist.

Clayton Christensen

#16. If you go away on location for three months and your wife stays at home, you've made a whole new load of friends and she's made a whole new load of friends and you get home and you're kind of strangers.

Michael Caine

#17. Sometimes I think that's all love is. Understanding, smoothing away your strangeness. Making you part of the world, not separate from it.

Alexis Hall

#18. The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.

Herbert Butterfield

#19. Of all the intellectual hurdles which the human mind has confronted and has overcome in the last fifteen hundred years the one which seems to me to have been the most amazing in character and the most stupendous in the scope of its consequences is the one relating to the problem of motion.

Herbert Butterfield

#20. The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical".

Herbert Butterfield

#21. About the scientific revolution: it "outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes".

Herbert Butterfield

#22. I have an affinity for Africa, especially East Africa, and Kansas looks very much like that.

Bill Kurtis

#23. When you make an omelet, as when you make love, affection counts for more than technique.

Isabel Allende

#24. I will work in my own way, according to the light that is in me.

Lydia M. Child

#25. Hearthstone bowed his head in gratitude. He stepped away from the dais, cradling his new pouch o' power like it was a swaddled baby.

Rick Riordan

#26. You'd get jealous if she hugged a tree, Archer tossed out.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#27. [History is] the very servant of the servants of God, the drudge of all the drudges.

Herbert Butterfield

#28. Claude Levi-Strauss has been a great source of fruitful irritation to my mind.

Ursula K. Le Guin