Fat-cats Quote by Joan Gilbert

“Uninhibited, they wallowed with zest in the filth and mire of their political conceptions and needs, among the very leaders of their society, but…

— C.L.R. James

Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to…

— John Robert Seeley

“Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts – between individuals in economic…

— Will Durant

“A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or (as they would say) ‘sentimental’ values have in the background values of their own which…

— C.S. Lewis

“Those who are ignorant of history and the evolution of taste are apt at every turn to make the present age their standard, and…

— Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury

“The long tradition of naiveté and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third world, if such…

— Noam Chomsky

“We must resist the temptation to romanticize history's losers.”

— Niall Ferguson

“For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted. The bad manners of…

— Oswald Spengler

“One of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem…

— John Carey

“A lot of what we know to be history isn’t…it serves a purpose. Events are exaggerated, heroes fabricated, goals are rewritten to appear more…

— Louise Penny

Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Anyone who reads history at all knows that the passionate and powerful convictions of one century usually seem absurd, extraordinary, to the next. There…

— Doris Lessing