History Quotes - Page 36

The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

Robert E. Lee

There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.

Wallace Stegner

No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.

Horatio Nelson

The heroic and often tragic stories of American whalemen were renowned. They sailed the world’s oceans and brought back tales filled with bravery, perseverance, endurance, and survival. They mutinied, murdered, rioted, deserted, drank, sang, spun yarns, scrimshawed, and recorded their musings and observations in journals and letters. They survived boredom, backbreaking work, tempestuous seas, floggings, pirates, putrid food, and unimaginable cold. Enemies preyed on them in times of war, and competitors envied them in times of peace. Many whalemen died from violent encounters with whales and from terrible miscalculations about the unforgiving nature of nature itself. And through it all, whalemen, those “iron men in wooden boats” created a legacy of dramatic, poignant, and at times horrific stories that can still stir our emotions and animate the most primal part of our imaginations. “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,” proclaimed Herman Melville, and the epic story of whaling is one of the mightiest themes in American history.

Eric Jay Dolin

American whale oil lit the world. It was used in the production of soap, textiles, leather, paints, and varnishes, and it lubricated the tools and machines that drove the Industrial Revolution. The baleen cut from the mouths of whales shaped the course of feminine fashion by putting the hoop in hooped skirts and giving form to stomachtighteningand chest-crushing corsets. Spermaceti, the waxy substance from the heads of sperm whales, produced the brightest- and cleanest-burning candles the world has ever known, while ambergris, a byproduct of irritation in a sperm whale’s bowel, gave perfumes great staying power and was worth its weight in gold.

Eric Jay Dolin

What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?

H.G.Wells

Invisibility--there are things we can't see now, that are there, that are embedded, that it really takes time in order to be able to see. There are many ghosts that are lurking around and lingering through us that takes the technology of another generation or so in order to uncover and show what those stains and strains and perceived flaws really we're building towards

Lynn Hershman Leeson

Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him.

Diana Abu-Jaber

Warfare is a series of tragedies enjoined by logistics.

Kevin Carson

And once upon a time I wondered: Is writing epic fantasy not somehow a betrayal? Did I not somehow do a disservice to my own reality by paying so much attention to the power fantasies of disenchanted white men?But. Epic fantasy is not merely what Tolkien made it.This genre is rooted in the epic — and the truth is that there are plenty of epics out there which feature people like me. Sundiata’s badass mother. Dihya, warrior queen of the Amazighs. The Rain Queens. The Mino Warriors. Hatshepsut’s reign. Everything Harriet Tubman ever did. And more, so much more, just within the African components of my heritage. I haven’t even begun to explore the non-African stuff. So given all these myths, all these examinations of the possible… how can I not imagine more? How can I not envision an epic set somewhere other than medieval England, about someone other than an awkward white boy? How can I not use every building-block of my history and heritage and imagination when I make shit up?And how dare I disrespect that history, profane all my ancestors’ suffering and struggles, by giving up the freedom to imagine that they’ve won for me.

N K Jemisin

We were fond together because of the sweep of open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.

T.E. Lawrence

the story of liberty is a history of the limitation of a government power, not the increase of it.

William J. Federer

A new doctor had been sent for, Lazzaro of Pavia, who had administered to Lorenzo a pulverized mixture of diamonds and pearls. This hitherto infallible medicine had failed to help.

Irving Stone

No moment is ever isolatedWith history elsewhere, drilling its stitches.

Mark Jarman

A half-century later, Mark Twain would say that the gold rush drastically changed the American character, ending the tradition of patient apprenticeships, the gradual mastery of self, talent, and money. Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that has been with us ever since, most recently during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

Pete Hamill

...Raleigh was later to write, after a duel the hangman was the one who bestowed the garland on the victor.

Raleigh Trevelyan

I cannot tell whether diamonds appeared in his eyes or mine as the shine of adoration became the icon one sees in history, a Byzantine sparkle, Medieval armor against all odds.

Alice Shapiro

If somebody tells you ‘History will never forgive you,’ just laugh at him! Because when the history comes, you won’t be here! The threat of history never forgives you is a useless threat!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Disregard for the past will never do us any good. Without it we cannot know truly who we are.

Syd Moore

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

Eric Metaxas

My first reaction, every time I delve into an episode of history that I don’t know very much about, is anger that my teachers never taught me about it.

Steven Spielberg

we're looking for a planeet on the strength of a song. it's crazy I know, but its the only chance we have to do something useful." ...Evan Wilson said gravely "I think you're as crazy as Heinrich Schliemann - and you know what happened to him!""What" ..."you don't know what happened to him?" she asked her blue eyes widening in astonishment."Ever read Homer's Iliad, Captain?" ..."I don't know what translation you read Doctor, but there was no Heinrich Schliemann in mine - or in the Odyssey." "That depends on how you look at it." smiling she settled back into her chair and went on,"Heinrich Schliemann was from Earth, pre-federation days, and he read Homer too. No, not just read him, believed him. So he set out at his own expense-mind you, I doubt he could have found anyone else to fund such a crazy endeavor - to find Troy, a city that most of the educated people of his time considered pure invention on Homer's part." "And?""And he found it. Next time you're on earth, stop by the Troy Museum. the artifacts are magnificent, and every one of them was found on the strength of a song.

Janet Kagan

For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.

Tahir Shah

History looks queer when you're standing close to it, watching where it is coming from and how it's being made.

Janet Flanner

If England had not used the services of privateers and pirates during its long struggle with Spain, there is some likelihood that people today in North America would be speaking Spanish rather than English.

Robert Earl Lee

Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.

Julian Barnes

Emotion as well as reason belongs to the very stuff of history.

Beryl Smalley

The person who expects to understand history must submerge himself in it, must get rid of patriotism, as well as bitterness. And especially in studying a historic life that consists in insecurity must the historian rid himself of all insecurity. He must accept the totality of the data in all their fullness, the noble with the paltry, thinking of how the two interlock.

Américo Castro

To modernize their sleeping habits, [Peter the Great] declared, 'Ladies and gentlemen of the court caught sleeping with their boots on will be instantly decapitated.

Bob Massie

Thousands, if not millions, of people had exchanged life for the negation of life simply so that someone like me could have the pleasure of riding in a taxi. And now thousands more were throwing away their lives in order to try and eliminate global suffering, and they didn't see the senselessness of that, though it screamed out from every page of history and from every street-corner; in the scream you could hear the universal lack of order and lack of satisfaction and all the other shortcomings which were in fact the very essence of life - remove them, do away with them, and what would be left?

Leonid Borodin

Are you in the habit of taking tea with anyone who approaches you in a foreign port?” He went on and snorted carelessly. “No wonder you were abducted so easily.

V.S. Carnes

It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.

Randall Wallace

The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.

W.G. Sebald

Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.

Dejan Stojanovic

He was wearing a little bag of “Mojo” around his neck.

Nancy B. Brewer

Do you know a Psychopath?You do not know me; but after reading my memoir you will know me a little better and you will have had the experience of safely getting into the mind and life of a young psychopath in training.Critics have written: It is a powerful and unusual memoir; brutal and raw.A Psychopath In Training: In 1997 psychiatrist’s contracted by the Correctional Service and the National Parole Board wrote in their final report, before I was released back into the community, they had diagnosed me to be a psychopath.A Psychopath: How does one become a Psychopath?After of the death of my young mother, when I was fourteen, I became a ward of the state and forced into the care and custody of the Catholic Christian Brothers at St. John’s Catholic Training School for Boys until after I turned sixteen. Since then I have been incarcerated over seventeen years in various prisons, institutions and juvenile detention centres. I have been interviewed and treated by so many prison psychiatrists and psychologists I should be called the professional.In my youth I have experienced almost every kind of sleaze, sex and violence humans can inflict on each other. I had to learn the hard way on how to identify and deal with the people who were the dangerous psychopath’s in my life and the proof I succeeded is; I am still alive.My book cover depicts what is coming out of the government foster homes and prisons today: Our communities and our police forces are not at all prepared for the dangerous psychopaths being churned out. Are you ready? You and the educators alike can learn from my memoir.

Michael A. Hodge

There is no nation in the history that has not experienced bloodshed and murdering. We all have committed the same mistakes in a different manner.

M.F. Moonzajer

It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That’s not quite correct. We all forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective past can keep us honest.

Lawrence Lessig

-to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!

Richard Flanagan

History will be erased in the universal purgatory.

Dejan Stojanovic

She mourned the history that the invisible intruder had erased, but not enough that she would spend a second more of her future feeling the emptiness.

Thomm Quackenbush

My history is my step to future , whatever the history was full of garbage, but I can get over it and get to the TOP with my History

Ahmed Farrag

But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Hilary Mantel

France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war

Charles de Gaulle

No one makes history, no one sees it happen, no one sees the grass grow.

Boris Pasternak

Always do what you're afraid to do"-Robert F. Kennedy

Evan Thomas

I looked at the woman crying over the doll and felt something else. I was sick of people acting against their own interests. Mooing about how to refinance the slaughterhouse. Putting skylights in the killing pen and pretending the bolt in the brain was a pathway to a better field. I paid my bill. Save your fucking pennies for a gun and a history book, I thought.

Vanessa Veselka

It was like the first time I visited Versailles. There was an eerieness, like I'd been there before. I don't know if I was Louis XIV or Marie Antoinette or a lowly groundskeeper, but I lived there.

Maurice Minnifield

I did not know that history is like a blood stain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we pint over it.

Peter Carey

A very long time ago, some 2.5 million years B.C., the mother of human species as we know it, our ultimate ancestor, appeared in East Africa... She was four feet tall and probably black..

Norman F. Cantor

You see, I have been at revaluing myself in the last few days. I may have some value to historians because I have destroyed a few things. The builder of your Cathedral is forgotten even now, but I, who burned it, may be remembered for a hundred years or so. And that may mean something or other about mankind.

John Steinbeck

Let us search the old highways.

H.D.

Court life for a queen of France at that time was, however, stultifyingly routine. Eleanor found that she was expected to be no more than a decorative asset to her husband, the mother of his heirs and the arbiter of good taste and modesty.

Alison Weir

Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.

P.D. James

The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.

Herbert Butterfield

History is fiction.

Jennifer Donnelly

The philosophical study of nature endeavors, in the the vicissitudes of phenomena, to connect the present with the past.

Alexander von Humboldt

You know what I realized? No one else lives in my memories but me.

Liza M. Wiemer

Oh, he shouldn't be surprised, he's a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason, and it dismays him to see cruelty politely concealed in data, madness taken for granted and even honored, truth buried away and rotting in all that ex cathedra trivia--my God! something terrible is about to happen, and they have time to editorialize on mustaches, advertise pink cigarettes for weddings, and report on a lost parakeet! Ah, sometimes he just wants to ram the goddamn thing with his head in an all-out frontal attack, wants to destroy all this so-called history so that history can start again.

Robert Coover

The places and people in the following stories have been represented accurately to the best of my ability; yet my writing is supposed to be a tale, and as in any historical novel, my own imagination has blended with fact to create poetical reality.

Eric Sloane

Previous 1 … 34 35 36 37 38 … 61 Next

History Quotes - Page 36

Related Topics