Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

John Clark Ridpath

62 quotes

“We are now at the beginning of a vast and varied scholarship devoted to an exposition of the human family, and of the various parts into which our race has differentiated.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ethnic history is especially rich in the suggestions which it offers for illustration. It seems to call loudly for drawings and type-pictures and charts, to the end of a clearer and more vivid apprehension of the subject under consideration.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The author...does not flatter himself that he has greatly enlarged the boundaries of human knowledge, but claims rather to have cleared somewhat the horizon in this part and in that, to have visited in thought and reflection some unfrequented parts of the temple of humanity, and to have aided in his limited sphere to put the house in order for his successors.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is a speaking animal. No other characteristic of his nature is more universal or prevailing. Speech is the invariable index of the intellectual and moral condition of the human kind.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ethnic history...regards the human being as a maker—a maker of houses first, and of all things afterwards.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At length...man...emerges into the domain of the higher arts. Here he becomes truly ideal. Here he adorns as well as constructs. Here by the use of color and form he gives outline and substance to the things perceived in vision and dream.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“General history regards architecture, metallurgy, all manner of construction and fabrication, as facts in themselves useful and important, contributing to the strength of nations; but a true study of the human race regards all art products as but an evidence and illustration of the character, the skill and purpose of those by whom they were designed. In like manner government and laws...are objective products of the genius of man. But they are also illustrations of the character, sentiment, hope, and ambitions of the race.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The religious instinct is found to have been deeply implanted in nearly or quite all the peoples of the world. This was true in the dawn and morning of history, and it is still true at the high noon of nationality, power, and greatness.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What was the Method — the manner, the process, or processes — by which man came into conscious being on our planet, rising into rationality, asserting his sway as the principal inhabitant of the earth, and discovering in himself the ability to consider his own thoughts and actions as a study in natural history?”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Geology takes up the investigation of planet life where astronomy leaves off. The latter deals with worlds in their relation to each other, and incidentally with world constitution. The former investigates the history of our own earth in particular.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The earth has received the markings and the vestigia of all the orders of life, each in its turn, and has fortunately preserved, as if for the wisdom of after ages, very intelligible fragments of testimony respecting the time and circumstances at which each new order of living beings began to exist, and the successive stages through which the same passed in its differentiation, growth, distribution, and maturity.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Archaeology rests in turn on geology. Whatever evidences...of vital phenomena have been left in the astronomical and geological records...have been...tracks, traces, impressions, not...remains left behind by the living beings that have inhabited the earth. They are thus considered...as the testimony of the former presence of things unseen....Archaeology confines itself strictly to the works of man. These are considered with respect to their geological surroundings.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At many points palaeontological research touches the existence and conditions of man in the geological and archaeological ages. It considers him, indeed, as the culmination of the animal races whose antiquity is in the rocks and whose present activities are displayed on the dry land and in the waters of our globe.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The line of division is made on the principle that the remains of what man has done shall fall to archaeology, and the remains of what man was to anthropology.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ethnology proceeds confidently by comparison, by hypothesis, by analogy, along the lines of growth and expansion until it reaches the grand discoveries and noble impulses which constitute the ripe fruit of the most recent epochs.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has been proposed by modern scholars to separate that part of ethnology which describes the customs, laws, and habits of nations from the principal science, and to name the new division ethnography....The ethnographic inquiry is much more easy and superficial than ethnology, inasmuch as the latter looks more profoundly into the subject-matter of the investigation, and must proceed by wider and more difficult generalizations.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As in the case of the individual, there comes to pass a time in the progress of kindred and tribe and race when consciousness appears. When this happens in the individual, he at once begins...to consider himself, to remember....In like manner the rise of ethnic consciousness leads at once to that peculiar, reflective, and communicative form of mental activity which we call tradition and history.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The historian in the ideal history is as little seen as Shakespeare is seen in the tragedy of Hamlet....The camera is not seen in the sun picture; neither are the easel, the brush, the hand, and the eye of the artist seen on his canvas.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Primitive man was rife with conjectures and dim memories of his former state....Doubtless the former experiences of the half-conscious race were transmitted to him with his blood.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The various peoples differed greatly, some being comparatively taciturn, little disposed to communicate with their fellows, and others having a natural enthusiasm and gift in the commerce of speech. Some of the most intellectual and vigorous of the ancient races were loquacious to a degree that can not now be well appreciated.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The origin of man was the keynote of the oldtime story. The primitive peoples...were ever busy with the theory of the genesis of the race....All agreed that some explanation must be given of the time, the place, and the circumstances of man's appearance on the earth. All were agreed that in some way he had come. None conjectured that his past existence was an eternity.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The story was from one point of view as variable as the fancies of the race were vague and their creative powers capricious. But from another point of view there were common features in the traditions which now gained currency, and these common features at length constituted a sort of body of philosophy which was accepted with more or less reservation by the great minds of antiquity.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It might be said, even at this late day, that the whole intellectual structure of the world rests on the concrete of tradition.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As it was the first, so also it seems to be the last and greatest of the products of the human mind. As it was the earliest endeavor of the conscious race to express its concepts of itself, so also is it the latest endeavor of that same race to explain, interpret, and elucidate the true course and character of human affairs in the earth. In doing so the science — if science it may be called — draws within its compass all the results which have been reached in all the fields of human inquiry.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Above all other branches of knowledge, history sits and broods, with wings outspread as though the universe of things were pregnant and must bring forth under the shadow and power of thought.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“True history is the generalized result of all things that have been thought and done by men.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All historical perspective depends upon the chronological relations of the objects of the human landscape. There is, first of all, a horizon. The remoter facts stand far back against the dim line which divides the known from the unknown. The size, appearance, and relative importance of such facts must be estimated by their distance from the observer. The objects of the nearer landscape, as judged by the senses, seem vast and tall. Without the aid of the chronological perspective the concept of the past would be utterly distorted and ludicrous.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He who studies the prehistoric career of mankind...is as the observer who, sitting by the window of the flying car, may see the moving spectra of distant landscapes appearing and disappearing among the shadows of the other side.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We may not admit that the universe is an absurdity. We may not any longer suppose that our own small earth with its burden of interests, to us so overwhelming, is of any superior consequence in the universal scheme beyond what the size, place, and physical importance of our little globe may reasonably imply.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We may safely assume that the processes of the natural world which we observe around us are the same processes which have been giving form and feature to the surface of our planet through eons of past time.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great patent fact is that some races have outstripped others in their rate of progress, so that even to the present day a section of world history presents contemporaneously all stages of development. There are still existent in the world many tribes similar in nearly all respects, except with respect to strength and aggressiveness, to those primeval races which passed away during the formation of the tertiary deposits of the earth's crust.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The native inhabitants of Australia, the Maoris of New Zealand, the aboriginal races of other Polynesian islands, the natives of the Greater and Lesser Antilles — such as they were at the time of the discovery of America — and the Red races distributed through the New World from Patagonia to the lands of the Esquimaux, were all, at least until a recent date — as many of them still are — unacquainted with the use of metals in any form. They therefore belong to the age of stone as much as did the barbarians of prehistoric times.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The surviving barbarous races do not possess those strongly marked d animal characteristics by which the aggressive barbarians of remote antiquity were characterized. It would appear that the more peaceable, less warlike, less adventurous, less progressive tribes and races of the ancient world have in one sense outlived the stronger and more ferocious of the primitive peoples. The latter seem to have survived in a civilized posterity, while the former have preserved their ancient proclivities with little evolution or change.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The rudimentary breasts of the male...seem to point to a condition still more primitive in the development of our race — to a time when even the sexes had not been differentiated the one from the other!”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some of the West India islands were uninhabited at the close of the fifteenth century. The same circumstance has been noted in Polynesia. But as a general fact the world has all been inhabited, even from antiquity. More than this: the first comers, even thousands of years ago, invariably found the countries into which they made their eruptions already peopled by an earlier race.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The process...by which a population was finally contributed to the islands of the Pacific and to the American continents must have been so tedious, so much retarded by the opposing conditions of the natural world, so greatly heightened by the barbaric state of the primitive tribes by which the work was accomplished, so long held back by pauses and retrogressions as to demand for the accomplishment what may well be estimated not at a hundred or a thousand years, but at an eon of time.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With what a sense of impotency must the primitive man have come to the seashore! Even after the age of boats and ships, how did he cling to the shores and inlets of the seemingly infinite deep!”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No science but history — and history not well — is able to estimate at its full value the retarding and paralyzing effect of hereditary beliefs upon even the physical, to say nothing of the intellectual and moral, progress of mankind. Not infrequently we find the forward march utterly impeded and a given people held absolutely to their last camping ground for a thousand years by a single hereditary thought driven down like their tent pins through the belief and practice of that kindred.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The student of a Semitic language must transpose his very methods of thought and abandon all of his preconceptions and principles of analogy before he can enter the spirit of the strange linguistic structure before him. The student who has mastered Latin and French may take up Spanish and find so much that is common to what he has already learned, so much that is in analogy with all his preconceptions and knowledge, that his task is as easy as to go to the same city by a slightly divergent route; but not so in the acquirement of Hebrew or Arabic.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The attempt to derive Hebrew and German from a single original is, to say the least, beset with as many difficulties as confronts the ethnologist in his effort to trace an Anglo-American to the same stock with an aboriginal Australian.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the daydawn of history human speech had already been deflected into forms even more variant than those at the present existing. At that epoch the inflectional languages were in full efflorescence. The Sanskrit and the Greek presented examples of completeness in structural development for which the student of language must search in vain among the current tongues. Already at that most remote date, on the easternmost shores of the Mediterranean, a Semitic language had perfected itself into that perfect triliteral rigidity which we see in the sacred books of the Hebrews.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is as difficult to reach a common original for all existing linguistic forms as it is to find a common ancestry for the cave dwellers of Western Europe, the native Australians, the blubber-eating Esquimaux, and the flint-chipping barbarians of Polynesia.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the Graeco-Italic fountains literature, including history as one of its branches, flowed down and mingled with the intellectual life of all the peoples of Western Europe, and finally with that of the New World. It is only within the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the models of the classical ages have been to a certain extent put aside and the scientific type of composition substituted in their stead.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The annals and chronicles which we find among the literary remains of the East Indian races, the Mesopotamian nations, the Egyptians, and the Hebrews in particular, were not formulated by the ancient seers and scribes with a view to the preservation of an authentic narrative of events, but with the ulterior purpose of furnishing a mold and matrix in which the religious history and polity of the respective peoples should be expressed, established, and perpetuated.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Many are the forms and applications of tradition....Almost every tribe and incipient people urged some extravagant claim to a prior possession of the country or place which they occupied....Though we are convinced that the world was peopled by the diffusion of races, nearly all the early peoples disclaimed this method of possession, and asserted immemorial residence in their respective countries.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was scarcely an extant tradition of human genesis which did not associate the beginning of man-life and tribe-life with the earth....There was thus established...among each people a sort of claim to the earth by the right of an indisputable priority — a claim which the reader may well perceive to be of great use to sedentary tribes in maintaining themselves against the migratory invasions of others more warlike and adventurous.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was in the thought of antiquity a conception of evolution and a conception of creation. The two were blended. Man was made out of clay; but a supernatural being was the maker.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The legend of childhood impresses itself indelibly upon the memory, and passes down with the current of understanding, mingling therewith and combining with the beliefs and concepts of a later period of development. So with the oral traditions of the primitive world. They were manifestly produced in what may be called the childhood of the race, and were delivered by oral transmission to the conscious race which came afterwards.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Very little are the primitive races concerned about accuracy as to time and place. Such facts as time and place require investigation, laborious study, travel, mathematical knowledge, and many other conditions which the adolescence of mankind could in no wise supply. Whatever the mind could invent for itself by dream and reverie and fanciful excursion, that was abundantly produced; but the sober and solid materials and structure of real history were too heavy and exact and burdensome to be supplied or borne by the early races of men.”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the beginnings of history are to be found in wide-apart regions of the earth at a date as remote as twenty centuries before the common era, how great must be the. distance of that childhood of the race and that early youth when the mind, still surrounded with all visions and dreams, looked forth into a landscape and beheld on every side men as trees walking!”
John Clark Ridpath (1840–1900) said by 1900 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source