Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

[These]were the legitimate acts of self-defense which had been forced upon the Irish people by English aggression... We did not initiate the war, nor were we allowed to choose the battleground.

The shocking death of Hypatia ought to have merited a good deal of attention in the histories of the period. Instead it is treated lightly and obliquely, if at all. In history, as in life, no one in Alexandria was punished for her murder. There was a cover-up. Some writers were highly critical – even to fervent Christian eyes this was an appalling act. But not all: as one Christian bishop later recorded with admiration, once the satanic woman had been destroyed, then all the people surrounded Cyril in acclamation for he had ‘destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city’. The affected myopia of Christian historians could be magnificent: as the historian Ramsay MacMullen has put it, ‘Hostile writings and discarded views were not recopied or passed on, or they were actively suppressed.’ The Church acted as a great and, at times, fierce filter on all written material, the centuries of its control as ‘a differentially permeable membrane’ that ‘allowed the writings of Christianity to pass through but not of Christianity’s enemies’.

The simple truth? History was never simply history. If it was anything it was another collar—another means to control.

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

The significance of the effect is determined by the importance of the immediate cause.

The size of a plane does not change the weather but it will get you above it. The size of your faith may not change your situation but it will get you over it.

The snug log house looked just as it always had. It did not seem to know they were going away.

The solution, Britain and its colonial leaders decided, was to import people who were loyal - but not necessarily inventive or talented or ambitious. The colonial administration was soon paying cashiered soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars and bankrupt but loyal British farmers to make the crossing. Reform politicians in Upper Canada complained that the colonial elite had issued a large number of land patents, often for sizable estates, to loyal Tories in Britain without regard for any other qualities….The strategy worked….But it also had the effect of choking the economic and civic life out of nascent Canada, at a moment when the Industrial Revolution was beginning to transform the rest of the Western world.

The Sodomy sea shall cast out fish, and make a noise in the night, which many have not known: but they shall all hear the voice thereof.

The statue of Justice, symbol of the law, as she holds aloft her balance scale, is blindfolded. Justice is blind to race, creed, color – and to personal eccentricity. If there were a comparable state of Clio, the Muse of history, she would have to be presented with the blindfold lying at her feet, because the balance of her scales must be weighed with a conscious awareness of the facts and interpretations she must weigh.

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

The story of women in antiquity should be told now, not only because it is a legitimate aspect of social history, but because the past illuminates contemporary problems in relationships between men and women. ... It is most significant to note the consistency with which some attitudes toward women and the roles women play in Western society have endured through the centuries.

The story we write today will support the next generation.

The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright [Sophocles] says, it 'brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us that which was manifest.' Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion. ...I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything....

The story of the "bondage" in Egypt, of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises, their rebellion and escape - or emigration - to Asia, has many internal signs of essential truth, mingled, of course, with supernatural interpolations customary in all the historical writings of the ancient East.

The stubborn inequalities in the Unites States are not the result of some people living in a physical environment. Their environment is built by social forces, and those forces last for centuries because they are regenerated across the generations.

The study of history can be sobering and shocking, and morally troubling. One does not have to believe in original sin to do it successfully, but it probably helps. By relentlessly placing on display the pervasive crookedness of humanity's timber, history brings us back to earth, equips us to resist the powerful lure of radical expectations, and reminds us of the grimmer possibilities of human nature--possibilities that, for most people living in most times, have not been the least bit imaginary. With such realizations firmly in hand, we are far better equipped to move forward in the right way.

The study of the past helps us to appreciate that the ideas and values of our own age are just as provisional and transient as those of bygone ages. The intelligent and reflective engagement with the thought of a bygone era ultimately subverts any notion of "chronological snobbery". Reading texts from the past makes it clear that what we now term "the past" was once "the present", which proudly yet falsely regarded itself as having found the right intellectual answers and moral values that had eluded its predecessors.

The study of history should be a mind-altering encounter that leaves one forever unable to consider the social world without asking questions about where a claim comes from, who’s making it, and how time and place shape human behavior.

The stuff of thought is historical stuff―no matter how abstract, general, or pure it may become in philosophic or scientific theory.

The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.

The study of history is an antidote to the hubris of the present – the idea that everything we have, everything we do and everything we think is the ultimate, the best.

The student is to read history actively not passively.

The survey revealed, in areas quite close to known and even famous and well-visited Mayan sites such as Tikal, more than 60,000 previously unsuspected ancient houses, palaces, defensive walls, fortresses, and other structures as well as quarries, elevated highways connecting urban centers, and complex irrigation and terracing systems that would have been capable of supporting intensive agriculture. Previously scholars had believed that only scattered city-states had existed in an otherwise sparsely populated region, but the Lidar images make it clear, [...] that 'scale and population density had been grossly underestimated.

The task is not in getting the healing; the task is in what will you do with your healing. The task is not in seeing the light; the task is in what will you do with the light. It is when you have choices that God can see who you really are not when you are without.

The tallest slugger touched my forehead, and I ignited like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. Shards of dazzling light rippled under my skin. I was the constellation Grus. The Trifid Nebula. I was the Big Bang, expanding endlessly through time and space forever. "I thought I was dying. That I was going to expire on a cold slab, trapped inside an UFO, my body filled with every light that had ever existed. I couldn't imagine a better way to die.

The theory they used to prevent women voting was that the female brain could not comprehend the complexity of politics. Politics was for men. Child-bearing was for women. And the best supplier of reasons for keeping people in their place has always been religion. We saw it at work in the debate over slavery. The Bible and the Qur’an both took slavery for granted. They took the subordination of women for granted too. So we run up against the awkward fact that sacred texts can be used to supply ammunition for those who want to keep people under control.

The tears in my eyes are now running down my cheeks at the thought that I have been his wife and his bedfellow, his companion and his duchess, and even now, though he is near to death, still he does not love me. He has never loved me. He never will love me.

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.

The themes of Jesus' teaching are important, but of course he was more than a teacher. All the Gospels put the end of his life at the dramatic center of his story. Here all the hopes of Israel come together—he is the king of the Jews, the greatest of all the suffering prophets. Yet Jesus transformed those expectations. He did not lead Israel to victory over Rome. Indeed, one of the remarkable features of the narratives of his last days is that his increasing isolation makes it impossible to identify him with any one 'side' or cause. The Roman governor sentenced him as a Jewish rebel, but the leaders of Judaism also turned against him. He attacked the powerful on behalf of the poor, but in the end the mob too called for his blood. His own disciples ran away; Peter denied him. He did not go to his death agony as a representative of Jews, or of the poor, or of Christians, but alone, and thus, according to Christian faith, as a representative of all.

The television was on. It had been on for hours. Years. It was there. TV on demand, a great freedom. Hadn’t Burroughs said there was more freedom today than ever before. Wasn’t that like saying things were more like today than they’ve ever been.

The telling and the hearing of a story is not a simple act. The one who tells must reach down into deeper layers of the self, reviving old feelings, reviewing the past. Whatever is retrieved is reworked into a new form, one that narrates events and gives the listener a path through these events that leads to some fragment of wisdom. The one who hears takes the story in, even to a place not visible or conscious to the mind, yet there. In this inner place a story from another life suffers a subtle change. As it enters the memory of the listener it is augmented by reflection, by other memories, and even the body hearing and responding in the moment of the telling. By such transmissions, consciousness is woven.

The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn't take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out.

The things I call crisis and all the things that were coming after me are all coming to serve the purpose of God in my life.

The things you experience are written on your cells as memories and patterns, which are reprinted again on the next generation. And even if you never lift a shovel or plant a cabbage, every day of your life something is written upon you. And when you die, the entirety of that written record returns to the earth. All we have on this earth, all we are, is a record. Maybe the only things that persist are not the evildoers and demons (though, admittedly, they do have a certain longevity) but copies of things. The original has long since passed away from this universe, but on and on we copy.

The thing that haunted me that day, however, as I closed my notebook and put my coat on to go home, was not my ghostly image of Dracula, or the description of impalement, but the fact that these things had- apparently- actually occurred. If I listened too closely, I thought, I would hear the screams of the boys, of the ‘large family’ dying together. For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history’s terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you’ve seen that truth-really seen it-you can’t look away.

The thing about our choices is that after we have made them, they turn around and make us.

The thing that drew me to Lafayette as a subject - that he was that rare object of agreement in the ironically named United States - kept me coming back to why that made him unique. Namely, that we the people never agreed on much of anything. Other than a bipartisan consensus on barbecue and Meryl Streep, plus that time in 1942 when everyone from Bing Crosby to Oregonian school children heeded FDR's call to scrounge up rubber for the war effort, disunity is the through line in the national plot - not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington's army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen's pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbor, getting on each other's nerves is our right.

The time for princes and tsars and holy madmen was gone. In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks and telephones, murder and assassination.

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

The traditions of . . . bygone times, even to the smallest social particular, enable one to understand more clearly the circumstances with contributed to the formation of character. The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes - when an inward necessity for independent individual action arises, which is superior to all outward conventionalities. Therefore it is well to know what were the chains of daily domestic habit which were the natural leading-strings of our forefathers before they learnt to go alone.

The tragedy about history - personally and globally - is that while we may learn it we rarely learn from it.

The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser in musty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.

The tongue and pen are great outlets for wrath and resentment. (1849)

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.

The trouble is, we are incurable sentimentalists. We insist on makin over historical characters to suit our preconceived notions of what they should be, chipping, sandpapering, and polishing each personality until it assumes what we consider the proper contour and color.

The title ‘Lord of All-Rus'’ did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself ‘Lord of all the Franks’. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the ‘Ruthenes’ of Lithuania had assumed from the ‘Russians’ of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan’s good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years.

The Told shone brightly. They truly stood out among the Inhabitants for their life and love, and the power to rebrand words went with them. They employed every type of literary term to form new passages of powerful change, and they rose above the tendency to write about the mundane or the antics of the Untold.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency.

The tragic irony of modern anti-fascism is that the more successful it is, the more its raison d'etre is called into question. Its greatest successes lie in hypothetical limbo: How many murderous fascist movements have been nipped in the bud over the past 70 years by antifa groups before their violence could metastasize? We will never know--and that's a very good thing indeed.