Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by James Hilton

Quote by James Hilton

“The will of God or the lunacy of man - it seemed to him that you could take your choice, if you wanted a good enough reason for most things. Or, alternatively (and he thought of it as he contemplated the small orderliness of the cabin against the window background of such frantic natural scenery), the will of man and the lunacy of God.”

Quote by James Hilton

Create image

Author

James Hilton
James Hilton

James Hilton, a British novelist, was born on September 9, 1900, and died on December 20, 1954. He is best known for his novel 'Lost Horizon', which depicts a mysterious and enchanting utopian community located on the Himalayas. more

You May Also Like

“Along the way I kept running across wonderful bits of information about the women - virtually always women - who produced these textiles and about the values that different societies put on the products and their makers. When I talked about my work, people seemed especially eager for these vignettes, stories that told of women's lives thousands of years ago.”

StoriesWomenTextilesPrehistorySocial HistoryEconomic HistoryWomen S Work
Book:Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times
Create image

“Because neither corn nor wheat grew well in the Adirondacks, the favored crop was potatoes ("Our food was mostly fish and potatoes then for a change we would have potatoes and fish," recalled one early inhabitant), occasionally supplemented by peas, rye, buckwheat, or oats.”

PotatoesSocial HistoryDry HumorSubsistence FarmingAdirondack
Book:Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation
Create image

“Klingender's book, striking notes both desperate and defiant, is not typical of the long British tradition of Marxist and Marxist-inspired histories of art that would extend into the 1980s. The so-called social history of art interpreted art as the expression of the interests of communities or classes. In the past, art was paid for and shaped by the elite and the powerful. In the future, art would express the vision and will of democratic collectivities. The reality that art delivered was the reality of economic relations. There was no need for any other origin.”

ArtMarxSocial History
Book:A History of Art History
Create image

“When a quarter of a million miners are unemployed, it is a part of the order of things that Alf Smith, a miner living in the back-streets of Newcastle, should be out of work. But no human being finds it easy to regard himself as a statistical unit. So long as Bert Jones across the street is still at work, Alf Smith is bound to feel himself dishonoured and a failure.”

PoliticsEconomicsSociologyPolemicsSocial History
Book:The Road to Wigan Pier
Create image

“Sr James George Frazer, a Scotsman by birth, is the author of the immense Golden Bough, a collection of anthropological studies. The author's methods of correlation have been as crude and unregulated as his industry and the cultivation of his erudition have been immense. The confusion of savage and primitive states of culture commenced by Tylor and his school has been carried to excess in the works of Sr J.G. Frazer. From the point of view of the social historian attempting to disentangle the story of man's coming and growth upon this planet he is one of the most calamatous phenomena in modern research: he has smashed in the ruin of pre-history with a coal hammer, collected every brick disclosed when the dust has settled on the debris, and then labelled the exhibits with the assiduous industry of a literary ant. His pleasing literary style in that labelling is in unorthodox English.”

EruditionSocial HistoryLiterary StylePre HistoryAnthropological MethodThe Golden BoughSir James Frazer
Book:Scottish Scene: or, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Albyn
Create image

“The Enlightenment may have made its most lasting impact in the way we live and think today through its social history. Our institutions and laws, our conception of the state, and our political sensitivity all stem from Enlightenment ideas… Remarkably enough, at the center of these ideas stands the age-old concept of natural law. Much if the Enlightenment’s innovation in in political theory may be traced to a change in the interpretation of that concept.”

EnlightenmentNatural LawSocial History
Author:Louis Dupré
Create image

“The doctrine of the bodily resurrection of the dead at the end of time originated about two centuries before the life of Jesus, and by his day it had become a common feature of Jewish thought. Later, at the hands of Christians, it came to be transformed into a teaching of postmortem rewards and punishments, the ideas of heaven and hell.”

ScienceReligionChristianity
Book:Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife
Create image