M. H. Abrams Quotes
When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
Quotes to Explore
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History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.
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I'm resigned to the fact that the corseted history of America is not as exciting as that of Britain.
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In life, a lot of great ideas sound insane or absurd at first.
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If you love things or ideas or people that contradict each other, you have to be prepared to fight for every square inch of intellectual real estate you occupy.
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Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.
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It is well known that my husband and Lady Thatcher enjoyed a very special relationship as leaders of their respective countries during one of the most difficult and pivotal periods in modern history. Ronnie and Margaret were political soul mates, committed to freedom and resolved to end Communism.
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I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.
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When you challenge other people's ideas of who or how you should be, they may try to diminish and disgrace you. It can happen in small ways in hidden places, or in big ways on a world stage. You can spend a lifetime resenting the tests, angry about the slights and the injustices. Or, you can rise above it.
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I think one's history and past is important at a certain time in your life, especially as an artist, just to try to hone in on that.
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I believe that we must maintain pride in the knowledge that the actions we take, based on our own decisions and choices as individuals, link directly to the magnificent challenge of transforming human history.
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Creativity is generating ideas that are novel and useful. I define originals as people who go beyond dreaming up the ideas and take initiative to make their visions a reality.
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The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
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Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.
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History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.
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There is resistance to change. There's a resistance to ideas.
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When historians of early America turned from the pursuit of past politics, they devised a category known in the academy as 'social and intellectual history.' In it, they stuffed nearly everything except politics on the assumption, which the anthropologists assured them was correct, that it would all fit together. Somehow it did not.
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My company Independent Ideas worked with Gucci on a special edition Fiat 500.
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Scientists and academics in particular focus on detail and the minutiae. When they talk to each other, they usually don't focus on the broad ideas; they don't focus on social interconnectedness. They focus on the task that they're doing.
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A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.
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An idea in man is first impressed upon him and afterwards expressed in things, but in God it is only expressed, not impressed, because it does not come from anywhere else.
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Jack: I can't understand it. On your show you always win.
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Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been? Surely he can only have been a thief.
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I painted it in Berlin self-portrait 'The Drinker', while screaming military convoys were passing beneath my window day and night.
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When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.
