HERBERT ALBERT LAURENS FISHER

No nation is so lost to pride as to submit the conduct of its internal affairs to the arbitrament of foreign powers.

In every generation good men have been perplexed by the paradoxical relation between moral and economic values.

You cannot change the psychology of a people by a coup d'etat, or by some quick process of political chemistry convert an idle nobleman into a serious worker, or a medical student into a full-blown statesman.

I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

The evils of European society were rooted in feudalism and entrenched in privilege.

If European democracy owes much to the Protestant Reformation it owes nothing whatever to the direct teaching of the Protestant leaders. — So deeply rooted was the reverence for monarchy that even the wars of religion in France and the Netherlands produced no distinctive republican doctrine.

He [the historian] should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

Nothing commends a radical change to an Englishman more than the belief that it is really conservative.

It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilization that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the established religion of Europe.

… a crowd is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it. The collective body thinks and acts in ways which the component units thinking and acting for themselves would never sanction and would often reprobate. In general the action of the crowd is more emotional and less intellectual than the action of an individual. The nerve counts for more, the brain for less. Waves of sentiment or cruelty pass through the collective body with a force which the individuals who compose it find it difficult to comprehend, when they are removed from the contagion of their neighbours…

Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels.

You cannot change the psychology of a people by a coup d'etat, or by some quick process of political chemistry convert an idle nobleman into a serious worker, or a medical student into a full-blown statesman.

No nation is so lost to pride as to submit the conduct of its internal affairs to the arbitrament of foreign powers.

… a crowd is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it. The collective body thinks and acts in ways which the component units thinking and acting for themselves would never sanction and would often reprobate. In general the action of the crowd is more emotional and less intellectual than the action of an individual. The nerve counts for more, the brain for less. Waves of sentiment or cruelty pass through the collective body with a force which the individuals who compose it find it difficult to comprehend, when they are removed from the contagion of their neighbours…

The evils of European society were rooted in feudalism and entrenched in privilege.

If European democracy owes much to the Protestant Reformation it owes nothing whatever to the direct teaching of the Protestant leaders. — So deeply rooted was the reverence for monarchy that even the wars of religion in France and the Netherlands produced no distinctive republican doctrine.

In every generation good men have been perplexed by the paradoxical relation between moral and economic values.

It was a republic, but unlike any other republic that had ever existed. There were neither taxes nor police, nor an army, nor an administrative officer, nor a foreign policy, nor indeed any joint means of coercion; only the heads of the scattered settlements—settlements divided one from another by snow mountains and lava fields and belts of black volcanic sand and pebbles — met together once a year in a common assembly and agreed to obey and enforce a common law.

He [the historian] should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

Politics is the art of human happiness.

If a treaty serves its turn for ten or twenty years, the wisdom of its framers is sufficiently confirmed.

The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history; but progress is not a law of nature.

Nothing commends a radical change to an Englishman more than the belief that it is really conservative.

It is a terrible commentary on Christian civilization that the longest period of slave-raiding known to history was initiated by the action of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and Britain, after the Christian faith had for more than a thousand years been the established religion of Europe.