History Quotes - Page 34

History doesn't intend to have some particular emotional value, or any particular moral. History doesn't have any intentions at all. It's just a never-ending web of events that can have pretty much any meaning at all. But we, in retrospect, make this web into a story that makes sense. We superimpose onto it a beginning, middle, and end. We decide who the main characters are, the good guys and the bad guys. We decide what the moral of the story is, and how everyone is supposed to feel about it.""But history is facts," I said. "It's not a matter of opinion.""To a certain extent," Dad granted. "The facts matter, to a certain extent. You can't create a story without some facts to base it on. But what 'really happened' doesn't matter. What matters is how we agree to remember it.

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.

In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.

What you say about your situation matters a lot in life than what you do to it. It helps when you know what to say. When things are not going the way they are supposed to go, God does not keep quiet, He always say something. Do the same, change your situation with the words of your mouth.

It is surprising how many great men started out as horse thieves.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.

For the khan, we will take their cities, their women, and their lands. This is the great raid, the farthest strike in the history of the nation of Genghis. We will not be stopped.

David Stern might be the smartest executive in the history of professional sports. His obsession with the Vagrant Kings is one of the strangest stories.

I grew up thinking the only scriptures on earth were those inspired by the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament, the words and letters of Jesus and his apostles, and the scriptures of the Restoration. But how could the God I believed was the loving God of all the earth not speak somehow to everyone else? For years I wrestled with this idea. Having now read the Chinese classics, certainly Confucius, but others as well, I believe I have found the scriptural infusion God gave the Chinese nation. Mencius is my favorite, I must admit, and I do not hesitate to call what he bestowed upon the world scripture--some of the most optimistic, holy writing the world has.

If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.

Number me the things that are not yet come- gather me together the dross that are scattered abroad- make me the flowers green again that are withered- Open me the places that are closed, and bring me forth the winds that in them are shut up- shew me the image of a voice: and then I will declare to thee the thing that thou labor to know.

In the end the war was Hitler's war. It was not perhaps the war he wanted. But it was the war he was prepared to risk if he had to. Nothing could deter him...He was no longer prepared to wait on events. He needed to force them to manipulate them to manufacture incidents to create pretexts for action.

Winners are the favourites of heaven.

They say it is a wide road that leads to war and only a narrow path that leads home again.

While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.

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

With Zia's controversial demise in 1988, Jinnah was finally spared the false beard Zia kept pinning on the founder's otherwise clean-shaven face.

If the word of God cannot do it in your life then your Pastor must be wasting his time.

Then, as now, archaelogists and writers ventured where others feared to tread.

Any event once it has occurred can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.

Of one thing I am certain: No single people, tradition, religion, governmental form, ethical program, moral code, or civilization has had sufficient wisdom and goodness to set the pattern and govern he world in the was of peace, decency and mutual respect. I do not believe God ever intended it to be that way. He wants us to reach out and learn from the wisdom he has given to humanity over broad sweeps of time and place and personality.

Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.

A little while, their hunger unfulfilled,The mothlike worlds flit 'round the guttering sun.("Ephemera")

I never realized that there was history close at hand beside my very own home. I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

More than half of our history is lost, not because they were not documented, but they had no guardians and protectors.

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man's follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.

Regard for the past only extends to its outward forms.

All his life he has been in the shadow of Grandfather, and of the man for whom he was named."..."Then, Grandfather would tell us it has nothing to do with fame.”“He enjoyed the notoriety, though,” said Dash.“Agreed,” said Jimmy. “But he gained it from being so bloody brilliant at what he did. He didn’t set out to be the most fiendishly clever noble in history.”“Maybe that’s what Father knew from the start; it’s just getting the job done and let history decide what history will decide,” observed Dash.

France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war

History is a funny little creature. Do you remember visiting your old Aunt that autumn when the trees shone so very yellow, and how she owned a striped and unsocial cat, quite old and fat and wounded about the ears and whiskers, with a crooked, broken tail? That cat would not come to you no matter how you coaxed and called; it had its own business, thank you, and no time for you. But as the evening wore on, it would come and show some affection or favor to your Aunt, or your Father, or the old end-table with the stack of green coasters on it. You couldn’t predict who that cat might decide to love, or who it might decide to bite. You couldn’t tell what it thought or felt, or how old it might really be, or whether it would one day, miraculously, decide to let you put one hand, very briefly, on its dusty head.History is like that.Of course, unlike your Aunt’s cat, history is going on all around you, all the time, and is often quite lively. Sometimes it rests in a sunbeam for a peaceful century or two, but on the whole, history is always plotting, and it bites very hard. It stalks around the world, fickle and dissatisfied and often angry. It demands to be fed just a little earlier each day, until you find yourself carving meat from the bone as fast as you can, faster than you thought possible, just to satisfy it. Some people have a kind of marvelous talent for calming it and enticing it onto their laps. To some it will never even spare a glance.

Technology has become the West’s main prop to its claims of inherent superiority over the non-West, and the reason why the non-West should adopt Western culture. If advanced technology is particular to Western culture, then it is only by Westernizing that the non-West can obtain it. This argument collapses if Western technology can be adopted in isolation from the broader culture, or if other cultures can generate significant technology independently.

I hope to stand firm enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.

We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.

You cannot have a dream and expect someone else's faith to make it a reality for you. Habakuk 2:4

If you live long enough, you see the same eyes in different people

As far back as history records people thinking, thinking peoplehave been befuddled by the mysteries of life and existence.

Haslam leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to make of Matthews' mental world: this is gibberish and nothing more.

I wanted that future officer to weigh decisions with a supple mind and to be comfortable with nuance and uncertainty.

Never underestimate what teens can understand or do. They're smart, creative, and fresh-minded. I wish I was one.

It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,

So they all went away from the little log house. The shutters were over the windows, so the little house could not see them go. It stayed there inside the log fence, behind the two big oak trees that in the summertime had made green roofs for Mary and Laura to play under. And that was the last of the little house

As iron rusts when not used, and water gets foul from standing or turns to ice when exposed to cold, so the intellect degenerates without exercise.-Leonard Da Vinci

All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.

Here dwell together still two men of noteWho never lived and so can never die:How very near they seem, yet how remoteThat age before the world went all awry.But still the game’s afoot for those with earsAttuned to catch the distant view-halloo:England is England yet, for all our fears–Only those things the heart believes are true.A yellow fog swirls past the window-paneAs night descends upon this fabled street:A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.Here, though the world explode, these two survive,And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

I have always understood that money made in the patent medicine business is a practical bar to social success.

Clearly, naming the major figures in the tradition had become a tradition in itself.

As scientific truths put us in an intelligent relaton with the cosmos, as historic truth puts us in temporal relation with the rise and fall of civilization, so does Christ put us in intelligent relation with God the Father; for He is the only possible Word by which God can address Himself to a world of sinners.

They never let you live it down. One little mistake!"- Nero

Hold onto your periwigs, I'm going to start you off with a whirlwind tour of the history of Stuart Britain; a time that encompassed the vast majority of the seventeenth century and the first fourteen years of the eighteenth.

-“Forced love hurts God.”
-“How can you hurt something that doesn’t exist?”-“At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.”- “I was once so open to the world it hurts”- “Act natural is the worst thing you can say to an actor. They simply forget how to be.”-“Until the first thing they learn are the last thing they forget.” -“It wasn’t just talking back to him, it was the confidence to be calm doing it.”-“The fact that the nation has gone to war does not make those who opposed it at the beginning, and those who oppose it now, traitors.”-“This beauty is a force, and it will never lose.”-“how a cause cements two people, masks their differences as secondary to the purpose at hand”-

History affects our future but it doesn’t determine it.

Sometimes the fact that you can't sense God isn't an indication that He is not there. It is just an indication that you are hanging out in the wrong place.The cave is not a physical location, it is a state of mind.

In fact, poetry has always been like archives that peoples have continually used to serve their feelings, thoughts, national identities and cultures, and it has served as a factor uniting different historical periods. Those who had lost contact with their past for a certain period found and experienced the expression of their own selves in poetry, and the were able to see their history as a whole in it.

Great persons, like great empires, leave their mark on history.

History should be studied but not worshipped.

...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

The problem is that history is not a dialectic progression but a biome, a swamp where ideas chase each other around and wallow and where drupelets of their larvae cluster and then hatch to devour siblings.