John > John's Quotes

“All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones…Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow’s fall”
― Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow

“There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Good historians...have the future in their bones”
― Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?

“We hate ourselves...We hate our own failures and our own weaknesses. We hate ourselves because we cannot help comparing what we are with what we might be. Our discontent is the voice of God in us, prodding us to live up to ourselves. Until we recognize and admit this we will always turn savagely outward, destroying other things because ourselves are at fault.”
― Wallace Stegner, Joe Hill

“I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.”
― Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe

“Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.”
― Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow

“Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests”
― Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?

“These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”
― Thomas Paine, Works of Thomas Paine

“One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation.”
― Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900

“By what peculiar twist of perception, I wondered, had I managed to see the plowed fields and second-growth forests of southern Wisconsin—a landscape of former prairies now long vanished—as somehow more “natural” than the streets, buildings, and parks of Chicago? All represented drastic human alterations of earlier landscapes.”
― William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

“Resources, waterways, and climatic zones loom so large in their writings that one can almost forget that people have something to do with the building of cities.”
― William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Oft have I marked, with silent pleasure and admiration, the force and prevalence, through the United States, of the principle that the supreme power resides in the people, and that they never part with it. It may be called the panacea in politics.”
― James Wilson

“Rooting arguments in evidence and respecting scholarly norms, historians must craft stories that shape the future as well as the past.”
― Michael J. Lansing, Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics

“Environmental history is, among other things, a lengthy account of human beings over and over imagining their way into a serious pickle.”
― Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado

“History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; history is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.”
― Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family: Critique of Critical Critique

“We stood by and allowed what happened to the Great Plains a century ago, the destruction of one of the ecological wonders of the world. In modern America, we need to see this with clear eyes, and soberly, so that we understand well that the flyover country of our own time derives much of its forgettability from being a slate wiped almost clean of its original figures.”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

“If things keep going the way they have in recent years, acrimonious historical debate may soon rival kudzu for prominence on the southern landscape”
― Charles B. Dew, Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War

“Why did we so consistently look at the West through the sights of a rifle?”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free--honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just--a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“Historical consciousness therefore leaves you, as does maturity itself, with a simultaneous sense of your own significance and insignificance. Like Friedrich's wanderer, you dominate a landscape even as you're diminished by it. You're suspended between sensibilities that are at odds with one another, but it's precisely within that suspension that your own identity--whether as a person or a historian--tends to reside. Self-doubt must always precede self-confidence. It should never, however, cease to accompany, challenge, and by these means discipline self-confidence.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“Whenever American farmers leave their plows en masse and race threateningly after the regular politicians they are called wild jackasses, or worse. An agrarian tide is said to be rising, or a fire sweeping the prairies, or a farm rebellion in progress. Mixing of the burning and flowing and rebelling metaphors is hard to avoid...The hoofprints of the wild jackasses are on our democracy, and its configuration is the better for them.”
― Dale Kramer

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Neutrality is a luxury of the comfortable; in these uncomfortable times, our students and our academic communities need more from us.”
― Kevin M. Gannon, Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto

“Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević.”
― Anthony Bourdain