Herbert Butterfield Quotes
- The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history ...…
- The Whig interpretation of history ... is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided…
- 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…
- It [the scientific revolution] outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal…
- The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.
- 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…
- 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…
- Those people work more wisely who seek to achieve good in their own small corner of the world ... than those who are forever thinking…
- In the last resort, sheer insight is the greatest asset of all.
- 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…