George Macaulay Trevelyan citations (10 citations)

“[Education] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”

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George Macaulay Trevelyan

English Social History (1942), ch. 18.

“She regarded it as a first charge of her slender war-budget to see that French and Dutch independence were maintained against Philip. This was secured, partly by English help and by the holding of the seas, and partly by domestic alliance of the Calvinists with Catholic 'politiques' averse to Spanish domination; it followed that an element of liberality and toleration very rare in the Europe of that day made itself felt in France and in Holland in a manner agreeable to Elizabeth's eclectic spirit.”

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George Macaulay Trevelyan

A Shortened History of England (1959)

“Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a disconcerting catechism on the nature of true knowledge.”

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George Macaulay Trevelyan

History of England http://books.google.com/books?id=6hUTAQAAIAAJ&q="Socrates+gave+no+diplomas+or+degrees+and+would+have+subjected+any+disciple+who+demanded+one+to+a+disconcerting+catechism+on+the+nature+of+true+knowledge" (1960).

“In the Stuart era, the English developed for themselves, without foreign participation or example, a system of Parliamentary government, local administration and freedom of speech and person, clean contrary to the prevailing tendencies on the continent, which was moving fast toward regal absolution, centralized bureaucracy, and the subjection of the individual to the State.”

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George Macaulay Trevelyan

A Shortened History of England (1959)

“In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watch, with its rapid sequence of amusing incidents, each ball a potential crisis!”

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George Macaulay Trevelyan

English Social History (1942), ch. 8.

“One outcome of the Norman Conquest was the making of the English language. …the speech of Alfred and Bede, was exiled from hall and bower, from court and cloister, and was despised as a peasant's jargon… It ceased almost, though not quite, to be a written language. … Now when a language is seldom written and is not an object of interest to scholars, it quickly adapts itself in the mouths of plain people to the needs and uses of life. …it can be altered much more easily when there are no grammarians to protest. During the three centuries when our native language was a peasant's dialect, it lost its clumsy inflexions and elaborate genders, and acquired the grace, suppleness, and adaptability which are among its chief merits.”

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George Macaulay Trevelyan

A Shortened History of England (1959)

“Their demands were limited and practical, and for that reasonthey successfully initiated a movement that led in the end to yet undreamt-of liberties for all.”

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George Macaulay Trevelyan

describing the English barons who pressured King John into accepting the Magna Carta.
A Shortened History of England (1959)

“The Charter was regarded as important because it assigned definite and practical remedies to temporary evils. There was very little that was abstract in its terms, less even than later generations supposed…. A King had been brought to order, not by a posse of reactionary feudalists, but the community of the land under baronial leadership; a tyrant had been subjected to the laws which hitherto it had been his private privilege to administer and to modify at will. A process had begun which was to end in putting the power of the Crown into the hands of the community at large.”

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George Macaulay Trevelyan

on the Magna Carta's legacy
A Shortened History of England (1959)

“If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.”

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George Macaulay Trevelyan

English Social History (1942), ch. 8.

“The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today…The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.”

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George Macaulay Trevelyan

"Autobiography of an Historian", An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949).

George Macaulay Trevelyan citations

George Macaulay Trevelyan: Citations en anglais