Communication Quote by Henry David Thoreau

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to…

— Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

“Most young men and women (...) grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the…

— Eric Hobsbawm

Nothing is more common than to find men, whose works are now totally neglected, mentioned with praises by their contemporaries as the oracles of…

— Samuel Johnson

As it often happens that the best men are but little known, and consequently cannot extend the usefulness of their examples a great way,…

— Henry Fielding

Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from…

— Jacob Burckhardt

Historians have become far too precious. Their work has become ever more specialised and, as they steadily lose the context of their studies, they…

— David Starkey

Study men, not historians.

— Harry S Truman

The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labor for their daily bread, is important to a degree which cannot…

— Charles Darwin

All that the historians give us are little oases in the desert of time, and we linger fondly in these, forgetting the vast tracks…

— J. A. Spender

In his commerce with men I mean him to include- and that principally- those who live only in the memory of books. By means…

— Michel de Montaigne

“Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now…

— George Mac Donald

“He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have…

— Marcel Proust