Best 5189 quotes in «history quotes» category

They that be born in the strength of youth are of one fashion, and they that are born in the time of age, when the womb fail, are otherwise.

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

They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown.

Thine own things, and such as are grown up with thee, canst thou not know; How should thy vessel then be able to comprehend the way of the Highest, and, the world being now outwardly corrupted to understand the corruption that is evident in my sight?

They would never forget the war. The world wouldn’t let them, and neither would history.

Think about it. People in the sixteenth century - not to mention in Jesus's time - didn't look like this: perfect skin, perfect hairdos, spotless clothes. These are people who went to the bathroom in the street, for God's sake. There's no way they looked like this. But that's how we're going to remember them. Our alabaster past. When nothing else is left, art will become the truth of the time. Then people will get to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and wonder what happened - how we all became so imperfect.

Things just happen, one after another. They don't care who knows. But history... ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just... well, things happening one after another.

Thinking back on the outing to the theatre, she added, ‘I want a man, not a preening peacock!

Think of history as a giant old jukebox. The many records it contains play the same music over and over, time after time, year after year, no matter where you take it. From Rome to Constantinople; to greater Europe, to America, the songs are the same. The knowledge of history can be used by the people to prevent the mistakes of the past and in due course, advance the human condition.

Thirty years later, at the end of Huddleston’s career, formal portraits of the dead were no longer fashionable. The very idea was labeled morbid and ghoulish in the determinedly cheerful post-war, post-Depression boom times. Miraculous antibiotics had just been introduced, vaccines protected the young from the diseases that had decimated earlier child populations. Birth and death had been shuttled behind hospital screens to be dealt with by white-gowned professionals. For the first time in human history people could afford the luxury of declaring death to be in bad taste.

Third Reich was a term that was never used by Adolf Hitler. The term 'Third Reich' is used by so-called scholars and news journalists (and Wikipedia posters) to hide the fact that Hitler called his regime 'Socialism.' Scholars, journalists (and wakipedia) cite no example of Hitler ever using the term 'Third Reich.' Other writers use the terms 'Nazi' and 'Fascist' and 'Third Reich' as if Hitler tossed them around all the time. Those terms were not used as self-identifiers by the self-avowed socialist Hitler.

This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.

This arrogant, conceited history strides with her head in the clouds and never looks down. She does not realize how she crushes millions of people beneath her feet. The common people. She doesn't understand that one may cut a mountain in two, but people? It's a hard task, Bhai, to cute one people in two. They bleed." A deep sigh coursed through the gathering. Master Fazal said, "History will keep on marching like this. The names of a few people will stick to her fabric. She will register those. there was Hitler, there was Mussolini, Churchill and Joseph Stalin, among others. this time the names maybe Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah, Subhash Bose! But the names of the lakhs and crores who have lost their lives will be nowhere. They will be mere numbers in which all of us will be included!".

This arrogant, conceited history strides with her head in the clouds and never looks down. She does not realize how she crushes millions of people beneath her feet. The common people. She doesn't understand that one may cut a mountain in two, but people? It's a hard task, Bhai, to cute one people in two. They bleed.

This city had been a city for two thousand years, and I could feel that with every step I took. bits of all that time were still here, alive, even if it was just in the form of collective memory.

This city is like no other city in the world. It is brilliant but it is bloated, and I've never called it home

This book is just a book, about a pound of paper like so many other books. It can be read or ignored. What is the problem with that? Only, if we ignore such books, our civilization will disappear.

This book is important due to the historical insights of Der Ling rather than her literary skill. Her life and works underscore a shrewd ability to adapt and make the most out of her various experiences.

...this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

This history has for so long lived like a spider in my breast. The spider spins and spins, catching memories in its web, threatening to devour every final happiness. With this letter I hope to sweep away the terror and the sadness and to have my heart made pure again by God's grace.

This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be.

This is a world of lies and always has been. We live in a time of even greater deceptions than in centuries past. So much of what we're told, what we see on TV, what we read in the newspapers or on the Internet, is invented to conceal the truth, protect the wicked, increase the power of those who already have more power than all the kings of history combined." "I don't disagree," she said. "But what does that have to do with the price of a pistol?

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made. (pg.333)

This is my eternal obligation — to be a guardian of memory.

This is not the first time that the world has been in a mess but you are still God, you left us on the earth, not only to preach in a building but to be the church beyond the buildings.

This is Shakespeare and Company, it's the most famous bookstore in the world." She pointed to the shelves that reached the ceiling. "Surely you have something on the feudal system or the court of the Sun King?" "All our books are in English, and there is not a great demand for works on the French aristocracy." "That's the problem with Americans, they're only interested in themselves," she sighed. "I learned about the Civil War every year from the fifth grade, but I never studied the Wars of the Roses.

This is Roshana, the last queen of the Amulen Empire, back when my people ruled all the lands from the east to the west. She is something of a legend among us. Every queen aspires to learn from her mistakes.” “Her mistakes? Surely you mean her victories.” “What?” I frown at her. “Roshana was one of the greatest queens in the world. She ended the Mountain Wars, she routed Sanhezriyah the Mad, she—” “For a foreign serving girl, you are strangely well versed in Amulen history.” “I spent a lot of time in libraries as a girl.” “Were you there to dust the scrolls or read them?” “Surely Roshana’s victories outweigh her errors.” “The higher you rise, the farther you fall. For all her wisdom, Roshana was fooled by the jinni, believing it was her friend, and then it destroyed her. Ever since that day, my people have hunted the jinn. There is no creature more vicious and untrustworthy.” “This is not the story I heard,” I say softly. “My people tell it differently. That the jinni truly was a friend to Roshana but was forced to turn against her. That she had no choice.” “Surely I know how my own ancestress died,” returns the princess, a bit hotly. “Anyway, it was a long time ago, but we Amulens do not forget.

This is the best book ever written on its subject. Granted being the only such book takes a lot of the steam out of that accomplishment.

This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom - we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.

This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on.

This is what I most humbly feel, If you do not love me, history will!

This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

This is the story I am working on. But it isn't complete as I don't have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes over time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they're put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn't one. I see that if I am lucky and do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end.

This is what I feared would come; this is what I have dreaded. It is not very bright and honorable as you have always thought it; it is not like a ballad. It is a muddle and a mess, and a sinful waste, and good men have died and more will follow.

This is where we work, in the interstices of ignorance, the land of contradiction and silence, planning to convince you with the seemingly known, to resolve - or make usefully vivid - the contradiction, and to make the silence eloquent.

This melodrama differed from others in that it was not written, it was to be played impromptu, and only once; after that it would be precedent, and would determine the destinies of mankind perhaps for centuries. Each of the actors hoped to write it his way, and no living man could say what the dénouement would be.

This new consensus seemed so compelling that Ernst Mayr, the dean of modern Darwinians, opened the ashcan of history for a deposit of Geoffrey's ideas about anatomical unity.

This ought to be about the place, if Alcapancingo's over there," Hugh said, "where Bernal Díaz and his Tlaxcalans got across to beat up Quauhnahuac. Superb name for a dance band: Bernal Díaz and his Tlaxcalans...Or didn't you get around to Prescott at the University of Hawaii?

This side of the Kingdom of God upon Earth, it is a melancholy human fact that those who beat their swords into plowshares end up doing the plowing for those who kept their swords.

This society [Jesuits] has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed the progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally. {Letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 4, 1816. Adams wrote an anonymous 4 volume work on the destructive history of the Jesuits}

This notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career-- something to work at, work on, 'make an effort' for and subject an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interest of not attaining grace, but of improving one's 'relationships'-- is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited by adolescents,' Didion wrote. 'The message that large numbers of people are getting... is that this kind of emotional shopping around is the proper business of life's better students, that adolescence can now extend to middle age.

This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.

This tottered ensign of my ancestors Which swept the desert shore of that dead sea Whereof we got the name of Mortimer, Will I advance upon these castle-walls. Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport, And sing aloud the knell of Gaveston!

This was the sickness of the age, the revolutionary madness of the epoch. In thought everyone was different from his words and outward show. No one had a clear conscience. Each with good reason could feel himself guilty, a secret criminal, an unexposed deceiver.

Those are the bad guys, right?” “Depends on who wins, I guess.

Those bastards have absolutely no regard for history! Why not just bomb the whole city and be done with it?

Those that can be troubled to muse upon the meaning of life are generally disappointed when they figure it out.

Those who are ignorant of Geology, find no difficulty in believing that the world was made as it is; and the shepherd, untutored in history, sees no reason to regard the green mounds which indicate the site of a Roman camp, as aught but part and parcel of the primeval hill-side.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it in summer school

Those that aspire to raise their head above the crowd are most likely to have it shot off.