Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

He who wishes to preserve, often destroys, so that virtue seems vice, and vice seems virtue.

He who wishes to explain Generation must take for his theme the organic body and its constituent parts, and philosophize about them; he must show how these parts originated, and how they came to be in that relation in which they stand to each other. But he who learns to know a thing not only from its phenomena, but also its reasons and causes; and who, therefore, not by the phenomena merely, but by these also, is compelled to say: 'The thing must be so, and it cannot be otherwise; it is necessarily of such a character; it must have such qualities; it is impossible for it to possess others'—understands the thing not only historically but truly philosophically, and he has a philosophic knowledge of it. Our own Theory of Generation is to be such a philosphic comprehension of an organic body, a very different one from one merely historical. (1764)

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.

Hey you — All our fevered history won't instill insight, won't turn a body conscious, won't make that look in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing to solve even as each moment is an answer.

Heydrich's life therefore offers a uniquely privileged, intimate and organic perspective on some of the darkest aspects of Nazi rule, many of which are often artificially divided or treated separately in the highly specialized literature on the Third Reich: the rise of the SS and the emergence of the Nazi police state; the decision-making processes that led to the Holocaust; the interconnections between anti-Jewish and Germanization policies; and the different ways in which German occupation regimes operated across Nazi-controlled Europe. On a more personal level, it illustrates the historical circumstances under which young men from perfectly ‘normal’ middle-class backgrounds can become political extremists determined to use ultra-violence to implement their dystopian fantasies of radically transforming the world.

He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist.

Hiding the past never works as well as simply neglecting it.

Hindsight history, sometimes call counterfactual history, is usually not history at all, but most often a condescending game of oneupmanship in which the living play political tricks on the dead, who are not around to defend themselves.

Hilary could talk for hours about the second of December 1805, but nonetheless it was his opinion that he had to cut his accounts far too short, because, as he several times told us, it would take an endless length of time to describe the events of such a day properly, in some inconceivably complex form recording who had perished, who survived, and exactly where and how, or simply saying what the battlefield was lie at nightfall, with the screams and groans of the wounded and dying. In the end all anyone could ever do was sum up the unknown factors in the ridiculous phrase, "The fortunes of the battle swayed this way and that," or some similarly feeble and useless cliché. All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us: the fallen drummer by, the infantry man shown in the act of stabbing another, the horse's eye starting from its socket, the invulnerable Emperor surrounded by his generals, a moment frozen still amidst the turmoil of battle. Our concern with history, so Hilary's thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.

His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives.

His jaw is on the floor. Here is someone who doesn't think that anybody does anything better than America and he is getting a lesson in what the best army in the world looks like.

His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.

Historia isipojirudia hatutaweza kujifunza jambo.

Historiography -- commonly and often simultaneously defined as the study of historians' scholarship, how history has been and is contrived, the history of historical writing, and the body of historical scholarship on historical subject matter -- is, therefore, essential to understand when studying history.

History and man made each other.

History doesn't choose individual people. History chooses everyone. Every day. The only question is: How long will you ignore the call?

History fondly remembers those who meet expectations but is written by a few who exceed them

History honors the unique minority the majority cannot forget.

History in the storyteller's hand was a potent force indeed,....

History is a living entity. Not just because of its survivors, and the stories they have to tell, but because of its enduring power to hurt and to heal, to create even as it destroys, to transform familiar old heroes and monuments into dust even as it raises fresh new icons from the ashes of the lost and the forgotten

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

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.

History is disappointed with us human being.

History is entertainment for the wise and a confirmation for the doomed.

History is full of recordings of conflicts while peace is considered poor reading.

History is getting ready to repeat itself,” she whispered.

History is hallmark of humanity.

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

History is His story. You haven't heard my story.

History is lived through and, for the fortunate, survived by people.

History is neither black or white, it is gray.

History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.

History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.

History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past

History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one.

Histories don't make men; men make histories.

History and memory aren't the same thing[...] History doesn't abide acts of the imagination but memories depend on it. And memories are as much what we've forgotten as what we recall. History cannot be forgotten.

History, as it was purveyed to us, was not so much a narrative, not even the detached observation of the rise and fall of fortunes and cultures. It was the litany of loss, attended by the inevitable sympathy for the vanquished side. The past was always the underdog, and we sensed it was only right to be on its side against the bully future. We were left with the impression that our own grip was loosening on some essential pediment as one empire after another was swallowed up, and the centuries collapsed into our own.

History can be created, but recreating it can ruin its originality.

History chews up sexually uncertain boys, and spits us out as recycled, generic greeting cards for lonely old men.

History doesn’t move you more than when it’s in the iron of your own blood.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil's music.

History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era. Literature brings us as close as we can come to reinhabiting the past. By reclaiming this use of literature in the classroom, perhaps we can move away from the political agitation that has been our bread and butter—or porridge and hardtack—for the last 30 years.

History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.

History implies someone noticed.

History is a creative art that makes secret agents in hidden organisations prominent historical figures, at least in the eyes of the masses, in global historical processes.

History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

History is a madman's museum.

History is a record of human nature in action.