History Quotes - Page 37

Yankee Stadium, it’s like everything else in this country. In Europe, they save all their old buildings for history. Here, we just tear them all down.

Bob Feller

In every age of transition men are never so firmly bound to one way of life as when they are about to abandon it.

Bernard Levin

In fact, the anti-Muslim stance of much of Hindu nationalism can be construed as partly a displaced hostility against the colonial power which could not be expressed directly because of the new legitimacy created within Hinduism for this power. Such a dynamic would seem to roughly duplicate the displacement of Oedipal hostilities in the authoritarian personality.

Ashis Nandy

In running over the pages of our history for seven hundred years, we shall scarcely find a single great event which has not promoted equality of condition. The Crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided their possessions: the municipal corporations introduced democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post-office brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune, and led obscure adventurers to wealth and power.

Alexis de Tocqueville

History does seem to repeat itself hence it's mindboggling to still hear the 'avoid all negative people' speeches from, of all people, supposedly important spiritual teachers. Ironically, their congregations would probably be the ones hiding their faces from the accuracies of truth speakers like Christ. Now, Christ was the complete opposite of negative, however the danger is that truth is often misunderstood as negativity by those who are constantly taught to only seek flattery.

Criss Jami

Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life.

Adam Gopnik

Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.

Philippa Gregory

The expression 'there is nothing like the good old days' does not mean that fewer bad things happened before, but fortunately, that people tend to forget about them.

Ernesto Sabato

You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training – if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralizing invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than they leaf to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance)...I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world…It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of the creator. A creator of what? ... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our significant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more significant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith – as I have defined it.

Rosalind Franklin

History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn’t change where you were from. But still, you didn’t have to stay there. You didn’t have to stay stuck in the past, like the ladies in the DAR, or the Gatlin Historical Society, or the Sisters. And you didn’t have to accept that things had to be the way they were, like Lena.

Kami Garcia

Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world.

J.M. Blaut

The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.

Rose Macaulay

Then, as now, archaelogists and writers ventured where others feared to tread.

Janet Wallach

It's all history out there, Clemens. Your history, my history. You and me, boy, not dates and things. You and me. That's what history is all about. How we came to be here, in the way we are, the clothes we wear.

David Wiseman

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

Stendhal

The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant -- that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them.

Paul Krugman

History is but the record of the public and official acts of human beings. It is our object, therefore, to humanize our history and deal with people past and present; people who ate and possibly drank; people who were born, flourished and died; not grave tragedians, posing perpetually for their photographs.

Bill Nye

A thousand years ago the Chinese had an entirely codified kitchen while the French were still gnawing on bones. Chopsticks have been around since the fourth century B.C. Forks didn't show up in England until 1611, and even then they weren't meant for eating but just to hold the meat still while you hacked at it with your knife.

Ruth Reichl

He who has never left his hearth and has confined his researches to the narrow field of the history of his own country cannot be compared to the courageous traveller who has worn out his life in journeys of exploration to distant parts and each day has faced danger in order to persevere in excavating the mines of learning and in snatching precious fragments of the past from oblivion.

Al-Mas'udi

The truth is sealed. Life goes on. Till one day, history changed... Like thief in the night, aliens invade human. Chaos happens prior to the new order of coexistence. The truth is sealed. Life goes on. Till one day, history changed.

Toba Beta

When the British left, India was a multireligious, multiregional, multiethnic country, exploited, backward, and poor from colonialism.

Prem Kishore

Over the years, the British had strategically pitted the Muslims against the Hindus, supporting the All India Muslim League and encouraging the notion that the Muslims were a distinct political community. Throughout British India, separate electorates had been offered to Muslims, underscoring their separateness from Hindus and sowing the seeds of communalism. Teh Morley-Minto reforms in 1908 had allowed direct election for seats and separate or communal representation for Muslims. This was the harbinger for the formation of the Muslim League in 1906. In 1940, the Muslim League, representing one-fifth of the total population of India, became a unifying force. They were resentful that they were not sufficiently represented in Congress and feared for the safety of Islam.

Prem Kishore

If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter.

Edward Shorter

Let that be a reminder to you that the past is one thing, but what we make of it, the conclusions we draw, is another. History can be many things, depending on how we read it, just as the future can be many things, depending on how we live it. There is no inevitability to any historical occurrence, only what people will allow to take place. And it is by dreaming first that we get to new realities.

Yann Martel

Many in America, as one social historian wrote, 'believed implicitly that New York's social leaders went to bed in full evening dress, brushed their teeth in vintage champagne, married their daughters without exception to shady French counts, and arrayed their poodle dogs in diamond tiaras.'...

Greg King

In olden days people were worse than us but knew much more than us.

Vladimir Odoyevsky

There had been a time, until 1422, when a number of both Gaelic and Anglo-Irish students attended Oxford and Cambridge in England. But fellow students had complained that Irish living together in large numbers sooner or later got noisy and violent and there was no handling them. Accordingly, the universities imposed a quota system on Irishman, and decreed that those admitted must be scattered around among non-compatriots: exclusively Irish halls of residence were banned.

Emily Hahn

History is always a grand fantasy... To reconstruct is to invent.

Eça de Queirós

Nothing is final in history. It always moves on. Peace must be built again and again.

Thorbjørn Jagland

There is no creature so perfect in wisdom and knowledge but may learn something for time present, and to come, by times past.

John Robinson

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true.

Don DeLillo

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?

Thomas Mann

In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.

Gary Snyder

Sometimes history cleaves and for one helpless moment stands still like the pause when the ax splits a log and the two halves rest on end waiting to fall.

Barbara Kingsolver

Augustine recast how people should view history, that history was not the story of the rise and fall of empires because those are human things. Those are the city of man. Rather, true history should be the history of salvation, of man moving toward God. It's a focus that takes the light off of this world and shines it much more brightly on the next world.

Thomas F. Madden

The importance of setting a date, as in choosing a colour, is a matter of selection. Orange may be seen equally well as 'the decline and fall of red' or 'the rise and triumph of yellow'.

Donald Thomas

…little people like me have to keep the true story alive. That way, when the revolution ends, and people come looking for the history, we can say, ‘Here it is – we kept it for you.

Mauriel Joslyn

We are entitled to violate history, provided that it results in handsome offspring.

Alexandre Dumas

And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it, Heaven." Washington himself could be a hard driving businessman, yet he found the rapacity of many vendors unconscionable. As he told George Mason, he thought it the intent of the speculators, various tribes of money makers and stock jobbers of all denominations, to continue the war for their own private emolument, without considering that their avarice and thirst for gain must plunge everything in one common ruin.

Ron Chernow

We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers.

Angela Y. Davis

Learn from history or you're doomed to repeat it.

Jesse Ventura

It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world.

Timothy B. Tyson

Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.

Jared Diamond

Lady Placida smiled. “History seldom takes note of serendipity when it records events. And from what I have heard, I suspect an argument could be made that you very much did earn the title.”“Many women have earned titles, Your Grace. It doesn't seem to have been a factor in whether or not they actually received them.”Lady Placida laughed. “True enough. But perhaps that is beginning to change.” She offered her hands. “It is a distinct pleasure to meet you, Steadholder.

Jim Butcher

The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.

Marc Bloch

News is only the first rough draft of history.

Alan Barth

We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.

Steven C. Rockefeller

Great persons, like great empires, leave their mark on history.

Janet Wallach

History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

Sarah Vowell

And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.

Christopher Hitchens

Listen, my father had written. Listen to hear if they are telling the truth or only part of the truth, for that is the lesson of history: that the victors tell the tale of their triumph in a manner to grant accolades to themselves and heap blame upon their rivals. Ask yourself if part of the story is being withheld by design or ignorance.

Kate Elliott

...early medieval Ireland sounds like a somewhat crazed Wisconsin, in which every dairy farm is an armed camp at perpetual war with its neighbors, and every farmer claims he is a king.

David Willis McCullough

When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our “fault.” But it is undeniably our inheritance.

Douglas A. Blackmon

If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.

Julian Barnes

Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history

Gregory Maguire

Such elusive puzzles recall the historian's basic dilemma: the absence of evidence does not always signify evidence of absence. In the end, we will likely never know.

Howard Markel

These,” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.

Aldous Huxley

The longer a life, the challenge is not the distance between destinations, but the difficulty of travelling light. My soul’s a portmanteau packed full, one half filled with what was, the other with what is, what should be.

Jamie A. Hughes

I am the keeper of my husband's history.

Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker

In 1914, Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian imperial heir, was shot and killed by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. Do you know the motive behind the act?It was in retaliation for the subjugation of the Sebs in Austria.It was not.Franz Ferdinand had stated his intention to introduce reforms favorable to the Serbs in his empire. Had he survived to ascend the throne, he would have made a revolution unnecessary. In plain terms, he was killed because he was going to give the rebels what they were shouting for. They needed a despot in the palace in order to seize it.What's good for reform is bad for the reformers

Loren D. Estleman

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History Quotes - Page 37

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