G M Young

From BillionQuotes

Historian George Malcolm Young (1882-1959)

Portrait of an Age (1936)

• “to play King Richard to somebody else's Wat Tyler has always been a Tory fancy."

• “The human mind is still something of a troglodyte. Expelled from one falling cavern, its first thought is to find another.”

• “a flight of perplexed unstable minds into the Confessional, into Spiritualism, into strange Eastern Cults.”

• “It was one of Lord Salisbury's paradoxes that only uncontentious legislation should be brought before Parliament: if it were contentious, then public opinion was not ripe for it."

• “To attend a place of worship, to abstain from spirits, to read a serious newspaper and put money in the savings bank, was in 1840 as good an ideal as could be set before a man. To pursue it gave him rank as a citizen, the promise of a vote, and a share in a solid civilization."

• “Of historic method, indeed, nothing wiser has ever been said than a word which will be found in Gibbon's youthful Essay on the Study of Literature. Facts, the young sage instructs us, are of three kinds: those which prove nothing beyond themselves, those which serve to illustrate a character or explain a motive, and those which dominate the system and move its springs."

• “The human mind is still something of a troglodyte. Expelled from one falling cavern, its first thought is to find another.”