Samuel Eliot Morison Quotes

#1. If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#2. If only [there] really was a door and [you] could walk through it into another life, where threads didn't snarl and stitches didn't go all tight and tiny. Where people loved you and didn't leave you for someone else.

Karen Hancock

#3. No big modern war has been won without preponderant sea power; and, conversely, very few rebellions of maritime provinces have succeeded without acquiring sea power.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#4. A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race [the Yankees]; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion ... A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#5. Around everything that is perfected, the unfinished ascends and intensifies.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#6. Franklin may ... be considered one of the founding fathers of American democracy, since no democratic government can last long without conciliation and compromise.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#7. An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#8. He won't be safe," Hatcher repeated. "For I will find him and I will strip the flesh from his bones piece by piece. There is no place the Rabbit can hide, no hole he can disappear into. I will not sleep again until I have heard him scream for mercy he will never receive.

Christina Henry

#9. The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#10. In this distribution of powers the wisdom of our constitution is manifested. It is the province and duty of the Executive to preserve to the Nation the blessings of peace. The Legislature alone can interrupt those blessings, by placing the Nation in a state of War.

Alexander Hamilton

#11. One learns more from defeat than from victory.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#12. A few hints as to literary craftsmanship may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

Samuel Eliot Morison

#13. Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#14. He [Columbus] enjoyed long stretches of pure delight such as only a seaman may know, and moments of high, proud exultation that only a discoverer can experience.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#15. One of the strangest things about being an actor is that people you don't know feel that they are allowed to comment on your hair, body, clothes, relationships.

Courtney Thorne-Smith

#16. I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.

Mark Haddon

#17. The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.

Samuel Eliot Morison

#18. Never, in these United States, has the brain of man conceived, or the hand of man fashioned, so perfect a thing as a clipper ship.

Samuel Eliot Morison