There were no books in Eden, and there will be none in heaven.
Augustine Birrell
1. "In England there are sixty different religions, and only one sauce."
Francesco Caracciolo
Other categories: God and Religion
2. "A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards."
Karl Kraus, "Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths"
3. "An Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination."
George Bernard Shaw, "John Bull’s Other Island"
Other categories: Reality and Imagination
4. "There has been a comparatively greater proportion of good queens, than of good kings."
Sarah M. Grimke, "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes"
Other categories: Authority, Government -:- Woman and Man
5. "Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy."
Benjamin Disraeli
Other categories: Human
6. "Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor."
Arnold Toynbee
Other categories: Various
7. "America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair."
Arnold Toynbee
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
8. "History, a distillation of rumour."
Thomas Carlyle, "History of the French Revolution"
9. "Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great."
Clement Attlee
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
10. "And what should they know of England who only England know?"
Rudyard Kipling, "The English Flag"
11. "The British tourist is always happy abroad as long as the natives are waiters."
Robert Morley
12. "History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."
Edward Gibbon
Other categories: Human
13. "Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old."
Rudyard Kipling, "Life's Handicap"
14. "Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most."
Norman Mailer, "Barbary Shore"
15. "A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs."
German proverb
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
16. "Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe."
Angela Carter
Other categories: Sorrow and Nostalgia
17. "I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version."
Don Delillo, "The Names"
18. "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts--the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art."
John Ruskin, "St. Mark's Rest"
Other categories: Art and Culture
19. "France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams."
Thomas Carlyle, "History of the French Revolution"
Other categories: Authority, Government -:- Wit and Humor
20. "Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian."
Robert Orben
Other categories: Various
21. "Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact."
Marlene Dietrich, "Marlene Dietrich's ABC"
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
22. "I do not know the American gentleman, God forgive me for putting two such words together."
Charles Dickens
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
23. "Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there."
George Orwell, "The Lion and the Unicorn"
Other categories: Peace and War
24. "A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else."
George Bernard Shaw, "John Bull’s Other Island"
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude
25. "Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do."
George Bernard Shaw, "Man and Superman"
Other categories: Authority, Government -:- Freedom and Servitude
26. "Every time history repeats itself the price goes up."
(?)
27. "In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting."
Stefan Zweig, "Stellar Moments in Human History"
Other categories: Intellect, Judgement
28. "American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe."
Harold Rosenberg, "The Tradition of the New"
Other categories: Time and Passing
29. "Everything ends this way in France. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, affairs of state - everything is a pretext for a good dinner."
Jean Anouilh, "Cécile"
Other categories: Health and Alcohol
30. "Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life's possibilities."
James Baldwin, "Nobody Knows My Name"
Other categories: Various
31. "Frustrate a Frenchman, he will drink himself to death; an Irishman, he will die of angry hypertension; a Dane, he will shoot himself; an American, he will get drunk, shoot you, then establish a million dollar aid program for your relatives. Then he will die of an ulcer."
Stanley Rudin
Other categories: Normality and Madness
32. "Palestine is the cement that holds the Arab world together, or it is the explosive that blows it apart."
Yasir Arafat
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
33. "History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the the movements of the world gave a chance for it."
Walter Bagehot, "Physics and Politics"
34. "The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen."
Walter Bagehot, "Physics and Politics"
Other categories: Art and Culture
35. "Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held."
Aldous Huxley, "Beyond the Mexique Bay"
Other categories: Authority, Government
36. "Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum."
P.J. O`Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"
Other categories: Authority, Government
37. "America is a young country with an old mentality."
George Santayana, "Winds of Doctrine"
38. "When it's three o'clock in New York, it's still 1938 in London."
Bette Midler
39. "France may claim the happiest marriages in the world, but the happiest divorces in the world are "made in America.""
Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"
Other categories: Manners and Ethics -:- Marriage
40. "History is the short trudge from Adam to atom."
Leonard Louis Levinson
41. "America is a country that doesn't know where it is going but is determined to set a speed record getting there."
Laurence J. Peter
42. "Some people make headlines while others make history."
Philip Elmer-DeWitt
43. "Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."
Gore Vidal
Other categories: Patriotism
44. "A mere fact will never stop an Englishman."
George Bernard Shaw
Other categories: Various
45. "History is statistics in a state of progression; statistics is history at a stand."
Ludwig Schlozer
Other categories: Science and Technology
46. "An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before."
Mark Twain
47. "It is the great north wind that made the Vikings."
Scandanavian proverb
Other categories: Nature and Animals
48. "Three Spaniards, four opinions."
Spanish proverb
49. "Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation."
Kim Stanley Robinson, "Red Mars"
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
50. "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization."
Georges Clemenceau
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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