Quotes about history

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past.

He had no ideal world of dead heroes he knew little of the life of men in the past he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

Dixon was not unconscious of this awed reverence which was given to her nor did she dislike it it flattered her as much as Louis the Fourteenth was flattered by his courtiers shading their eyes from the dazzling light of his presence.

The past is a foreign country they do things differently there.

Anybody can make history only a great man can write it.

Never lend if you need repayment never give where you want a return.

The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.

The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.

We do not teach history we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences - the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.

So time continued on slowly and painfully. Perhaps the old analogy of being a record stuck on repeat had become too dated I felt like I’d just gotten an IPod and only could afford one song so that one song played over and over again until I felt as if it was just part of the constant monotony.

History was what had happened class was something you read about in a book.

The United States is the result of an enlightened philosophy China is the outcome of traditions and history.

Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it those who fail to learn history correctly – why they are simply doomed.

History teaches us every day our understanding is the matter!

History reveals there is no moral high ground there is only perspective. We often exhibit the same behaviors for which we condemn others.

I hope… that we are making China more interesting and less exotic to our Europeanist colleagues. Soon it may no longer suffice for historians of Europe to make mere polite bows in the direction of China they will have to become more familiar with Chinese history on a serious level in order to carry on their work in European history effectively.

Kindness is not something you are born with it's a way in which you choose to be.

A historian cannot pick and choose his facts he must deal with all the evidence.

The pollenless trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds the stagnant air reeked of insecticide.

I know it's the belief that women should never show daring in front of men. Never be bold when men hesitate. I know flight is not the answer even to save our lives.

They think they’re runnin’ the country but all they’re doin’ is writin’ the reports.” From Homesteader Finding Sharon by D.M. McGowan

History wasn't just a collection of dates I memorized from textbooks it was tactile and ever present

No doubt the foregoing litany of obstacles in the path of success stands out more sharply in retrospect than it did at the time. Hindsight can distort prophets become prophets only in time.

History is a treadmill turned by rising human numbers. Today GM crops are being marketed as the only means of avoiding mass starvation. They are unlikely to improve the lives of peasant farmers but they may well enable them to survive in greater numbers.

How were they to square the tremendous wealth they accrued with their image of themselves as frugal and virtuous? Easy: just argue that commerce was itself virtuous. To be rich in corrupt old Europe must be a sign of droneishness but to be rich in fresh young American was the fruit of hard work. The beehive provided Americans with the ideal image for their religion of work.

[A writer] cannot serve today those who make history he must serve those who are subject to it.

He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything.

But history does repeat itself that is the comedy and the crime of history. Men learn nothing. Times change. Scenes change. Names change. But passions are the same.

Only the victor gets to write history where half of the facts are distorted and the other half invented.

History isn't written by the winners OR the losers it's written by the writers.

History must be documented every moment is a sacred history.

The historian without his facts is rootless and futile the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless.

The past does not influence me I influence it.

Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

We do not need a heavy theoretical thumb on the scales. What's important is how the traditional sources of law and legal interpretation - text, structure, history, canons of interpretation, precedent, and other well-established tools of the judicial craft - are prioritized, weighted, and applied.

I did this within a philosophical framework, and a moral and legal framework. And I have been turned into a cartoon of the greatest villain in the history of lobbying.

For me, adventures are a vehicle for travelling deep into the fabric of society, coming to know the environmental conditions that shape people's lives and viewing the present in the context of history.

I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history.

At the same time the folk boom was happening, the civil rights movement was happening, the anti-war movement was happening, the ban the bomb movement was happening, the environmental movement was happening. There was suddenly a generation ready to change the course of history.

Rules governing defecation, hygiene, and pollution exist in every culture at every period in history. It may in fact be the foundation of civilization: What is toilet training if not the first attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society?

It does not matter how much we donate it matters whether the donation is meaningful. How to define meaningful? Let society and history judge.

The BP spill was the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history. Yet somehow, gas companies like BP and Halliburton ran interference on reporting that story.

If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings.

For too much of history, we've viewed the world's precious resources - both environmental and human - as things to extract, to make the most of in order to maximize their potential.

One of the happier ironies of recent history is that even as Tibet is being wiped off the map in Tibet itself, here it is in California, in Switzerland, in Japan. All over the world, Tibetan Buddhism is now part of the neighborhood. In 1968, there were two Tibetan Buddhist centers in the West. By 2000, there were 40 in New York alone.

History, whether sacred or profane, hides her teaching from those who study her through coloured glasses. She only reveals truth to those who look through the cold clear medium of passionless inquiry, who seek the Truth without determining first the masquerade in which alone they will receive it.

History has shown us that, on extraordinarily rare occasions, it becomes necessary for the federal government to intervene on behalf of individuals whose 14th Amendment rights to legal due process and equal protection may be violated by a state.

When then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued me in 2003 over my stewardship as a director of the New York Stock Exchange, the NYSE's legal expenses were more than $100 million, which made it perhaps the priciest litigation in the state's history.

Britain kept its position as the dominant world power well into the 20th century despite steady decline. By the end of World War II, dominance had shifted decisively into the hands of the upstart across the sea, the United States, by far the most powerful and wealthy society in world history.

History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.

I come from a family that has a long history in the legal community of New York and New York state.

The existing legal constitution is nothing but the product of a revolution. Revolution is the act of political creation in the history of classes, while constitutional legislation is the expression of the continual political vegetation of a society.

The real violence is committed in the writing of history, the records of the legal system, the reporting of news, through the manipulation of social contracts, and the control of information.

I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal.

The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.

I think some of my darkness comes from my dad. There is definitely convict history on that side of the family, a lot of dodginess. But with the darkness can also come entrepreneurialism, genius traits.

What is history? An echo of the past in the future a reflex from the future on the past.

Roman history was kind of unavoidable where I was growing up. It was everywhere - all the place names and ruins and forts. My dad's a history buff, and I spent a lot of time on Hadrian's Wall. I became fascinated by the idea of what was so terrifying up there that the Romans built a 60-mile long, 30ft high stone wall to keep it out?

The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates.

Everything happens some get hurt maybe a fairy tale of damage but nature can't be change. We just walk away with memories that carries a story being made after as history.

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'...

We all knew the great lesson of history I from reading it and they from living it. And the lesson is: it is more blessed to kill than to be killed.

Such are the brutalities of war they leave a permanent imprint on mind.

History tells us what people do historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.

Human beings disappear their histories remain.

Great charismatic leaders don't just say what voters want to hear they say what voters want to say.

The means through which people may perceive Truth have forms Truth has no form.

America is the world's top war-master the most sophisticated killer-culture in history.

The nationalist regrets the change an ill-founded belief in the merits of purity blinds him to the virtues of the foreign and the hybrid.

Palaeontology is the Aladdin's lamp of the most deserted and lifeless regions of the earth it touches the rocks and there spring forth in orderly succession the monarchs of the past and the ancient river streams and savannahs wherein they flourished. The rocks usually hide their story in the most difficult and inaccessible places.

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.

Nobody should ever try to second-guess history the facts are fantastic enough.

Not that anybody cares two pins about history in these days.We've got rid of history history is all my eye. But I've got to tell you the facts.

We were each of us trying trying to undo our own history while wishing for Superman.

Rampaging horsemen can conquer only the city can civilize.

Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history it describes the theatre of events.

4Real men are men who have devoted their lives to solving the problem of others and giving a helping hand to those they meet in their journey through life. These are the kind of men that history can never forget.

God has given every man an opportunity and a chance to re-write his or her story it is up to you to use a blunt pen or a ball point . I have chosen a ball point and this is just the beginning.

History is the diary of humankind to forget it is to try to navigate the future with no memory of the past.

When ready to settle down: women are more interested in where the man is going men are more interested in where the woman has been.

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

The applause of his native land is the richest reward to which the patriot ever aspires. It is this for which 'he bears to live or dares to die.' It is the high incentive to those achievements which illustrate the page of history and give to poetry its brightest charm.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that in history, social studies or the art of fiction.

A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.

Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of Islam, and you will find that women have often taken leading places - on the throne, in the battle-field, in politics, in literature, poetry, etc.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'

There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world.

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

Minimalism seems closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies. Movies have really educated contemporary audiences to be the most intelligent, sophisticated audiences in history. We don't any longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next explained. We will figure it out ourselves.

History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid.