History Quotes - Page 47

Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.

Because some things that seem unimportant now can change the course of human history -- and I am a student of human history.

Daniel Nayeri

What is history but the story of how politicians have squandered the blood and treasure of the human race?

Thomas Sowell

Rome tolerated every abominable practice, embraced every foul idea in the name of freedom and the rights of the common man. Citizens no longer carried on deviant behavior in private, but pridefully displayed it in public. It was those with moral values who could no longer freely walk in a public park without having to witness a revolting display.What happened to the public censors who protected the majority of citizenry from moral decadence? Did freedom have to mean abolishing common decency? Did freedom mean anyone could do anything they wanted anytime they wanted, without consequences?

Francine Rivers

This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form.

Victor Hugo

God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the past.

Ambrose Bierce

It's interesting to see that people had so much clutter even thousands of years ago. The only way to get rid of it all was to bury it, and then some archaeologist went and dug it all up.

Karl Pilkington

We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You've got to marinate your head, in that time and culture.You've got to become them."(Speaking about researching, and reading, and immersing yourself in History)

David McCullough

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.

Freeman Dyson

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

Simon Schama

George W. Bush is the worst President in all of American history.

Helen Thomas

The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.

Mark Twain

The history of Science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it is a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.

John William Draper

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

Salman Rushdie

History is a vast early warning system.

Norman Cousins

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

Tom Robbins

History is not a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken, but rather, a glorious tale which I wish to be cast in.

Pietros Maneos

The geologist takes up the history of the earth at the point where the archaeologist leaves it, and carries it further back into remote antiquity.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak

Fools who don't respect the past are doomed to repeat it.

Nico Robin

And I thought:History is like a horror story.

Roberto Bolaño

Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core, but always ludicrous in its effects, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.

Karl Marx

The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

Theodore Roosevelt

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

Walter Benjamin

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it.

Woodrow Wilson

She had an emptiness in her eyes like a ghost tired of haunting.

Stuart Jaffe

The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.

Edith Hamilton

My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

Howard Zinn

But I knew the truth and that's why I was so sad. Every moment before this one depends on this one. Everything in the history of the world can be proven wrong in one moment.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

G.K. Chesterton

You can't be a full participant in our democracy if you don't know our history.

David McCullough

From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (1850)

Gustave Flaubert

For feeling, not events, is to me the essence of history.

Christopher Pike

...I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me. I never felt that more than with this trip. It was as if the act of touching these places, walking these roads,and asking these questions had added another column to my being. And the only possible explanation I could find for that feeling was that a spirit existed in many of the places I visited, and a spirit existed in me and the two had somehow met in the course of my travels. It's as if the godliness of the land and the godliness of my being had fused.

Bruce Feiler

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Our children may learn about the heroes of the past. Our task is to make ourselves the architects of the future.

Jomo Kenyatta

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Experience: the vehicle of history. Teenagers: the driving force behind fatal accidents.

Bauvard

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

Hunter S. Thompson

History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.

Victor Hugo

...That's why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old.

Lois Lowry

Somewhere, all the people we have loved and lost are still among us, in the house that we call history.

Graham Masterton

Confronted with the problems that characterize our herding culture, we are perhaps like the metaphorical man wounded by an arrow that the Buddha discussed with his students. He said that the man would be foolish if he tried to discover who shot the arrow, why he shot it, where he was when he shot it, and so forth, before having the arrow removed and the wound treated, lest he bleed to death attempting to get his questions answered. We, likewise, can all remove the arrow and treat the wound of eating animal foods right now. We don't need to know the whole history. We can easily see it is cruel and that it is unnecessary; whatever people have done in the past, we are not obligated to imitate them if it is based on delusion. Perhaps in the past people thought they needed to enslave animals and people to survive, and that the cruelty involved in it was somehow allowed them. It's obviously not necessary for us today, as we can plainly see by walking into any grocery store, and the sooner we can awaken from the thrall of the obsolete mythos that we are predatory by nature, the sooner we'll be able to evolve spiritually and discover and fulfill our purpose on this earth.

Will Tuttle

Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.

Hannah Arendt

The historian is a prophet looking backwards.

Friedrich Schlegel

Sometimes, you have to manufacture your own history. Give fate a push, so to speak.

Sarah Dessen

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

H.L. Mencken

Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.

Peter Hitchens

Insecure people often falsify the past, in order to make the future pure.

Shannon L. Alder

History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.

Carter G. Woodson

Sometimes - history needs a push.

Vladimir Lenin

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.

Haruki Murakami

There was one great tomb more lordly than all the rest; huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one word, DRACULA.

Bram Stoker

We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

Maggie O'Farrell

Why should we look to the past in order to prepare for the future? Because there is nowhere else to look.

James Burke

Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.

Howard Zinn

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

Stacy Schiff

The student is to read history actively not passively.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.

David Mitchell

No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to

David McCullough

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History Quotes - Page 47

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