History Quotes - Page 52

Go thy way to a woman with child, and ask of her when she had fulfilled her nine months, if her womb may keep the birth any longer within her.

The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did... And when your own people started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much... So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned their cornfields... But you still did not grow much corn.

In a curious failure of comprehension, I looked alertly about me for possible targets for all this artillery fire, not, apparently, realizing that it was actually ourselves that the enemy gunners were trying for all they were worth to hit.

Time is a strange storyteller. It writes, erases and rewrites endlessly. Things change, places and people become unrecognizable, but stories are repeated endlessly

Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.

No empire lasts forever, no dynasty continues unbroken. Some day, you and I will be mere legends. All that matters is whether we did what we could with the life that was given to us.

We see, then, that even from the zoological point of view, which is the least interesting and—note this—not decisive, a being in such condition can never achieve a genuine equilibrium; we also see something that differs from the idea of challenge-response in Toynbee and, in my judgement, effectively constitutes human life: namely, that no surroundings or change of surroundings can in itself be described as an obstacle, a difficulty, and a challenge for man, but that the difficulty is always relative to the projects which man creates in his imagination, to what he customarily calls his ideals; in short, relative to what man wants to be. This affords us an idea of challenge-and-response which is much deeper and more decisive than the merely anecdotal, adventitious, and accidental idea which Toynbee proposes. In its light, all of human life appears to us as what it is permanently: a dramatic confrontation and struggle of man with the world and not a mere occasional maladjustment which is produced at certain moments.

Only victors have stories to tell,we the vanquished were then thought ofas cowards and weaklings whose memoriesand fears should not be remembered.

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

The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.

The secret of all greatness is in knowing what to do with time. The secret of all the great men and women in history is that they converted their time into tangible products.

Have you ever make out time to ask God if there is anything or anybody you need to drop in your life? Are you still holding on to offences? When is the right time to drop it?I am sure once you make this attempt He will show you.I declare that God is going to set some captives free.

The Valkyrie’s heart was wrought of dazzling gold full of the most finest and firmest of loves, this being the secret of her many moods and akimbo inspirangular mercies.tt—On Kari, Ch. Fifteen Valley of the Damned

[S]hame is a child of custom rather than of nature.

It is then he realises that certain things loom larger than forgiveness and reconciliation: memory, for one, and history, bloody history.

Wherever problem persist, wisdom is lacking. There is no problem anywhere except wisdom problem. Wisdom provides solutions where there is complications.

Narration, after all, isn’t just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.

I thought those were others. Soon, I was to learn that they were us.

Everybody needs to be good-natured with a good heart, because in this way we can solve our own problems as well as those of others, and we can make our human life meaningful.

The hermit Anthony once told me that a monk is like a fish: take him out of his element and he dies. Silence is his element. In silence you can trade this shoddy world for Heaven.

If I have found favor in thy sight, and if it be possible, and if I be meet therefore, shew me then whether there be more to come than is past, or more past than is to come.

Once upon a time in the land of Shinar, God came down to see the city and the tower. People were united and spoke in one language. Then God confound their language and caused them scattered all over the planet earth. I believe, because of our technology, there will be one computer-based language on earth. Then God will come back again and make us all scattered all over the stars constellation.

I think about the Old Ones, that they have a past but no history. I think about the inevitability of death, and whether it’s not that very inevitability that inspires us to take photographs and make scrapbooks and tell stories. That that’s how we humans find our way to immortality. This is not a new thought; I’ve had such thoughts before. But I have a new thought now. That that’s how we find our way toward meaning. Meaning. If you’re going to die, you want to find meaning in life. You want to connect the dots.

Everyone now agrees that a physics lacking all connection with mathematics ... would only be an historical amusement, fitter for entertaining the idle than for occupying the mind of a philosopher.

History is Storytelling.

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say the present-day relations--the relations of bourgeois production--are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.

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.

One day in the woods he met an Indian. They stood in the wet, cold woods and looked at each other, and they could not talk because they did not know each other's words.

You don’t rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.

It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened.

When you praise God in pain, it is preparing you for provision.

Furthermore, a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not merely in experiencing history but in creating it can have no sense of destiny. And what kind of society is it that has no sense of destiny and no sense of self? That has no need or will to measure itself by the record of human achievement and the range of human endowment? And here we may pause to ask what our society measures itself by. Is it only by the ability to gratify immediate appetites, capacity for consumption, and the GNP?

There comes a time when time itself is ready for a change.

...history should continually seek to challenge our assumptions. It should prompt us to look differently at the world and make us less self-assured about our own ideals and beliefs.

The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but resistance to war, not only injustice but rebellion against injustice, not only selfishness but self-sacrifice, not only silence in the fact of tyranny but defiance, not only callousness but compassion.Human beings show a broad spectrum of qualities, but it is the worst of these that are usually emphasized, and the result, too often, is to dishearten us, diminish our spirit. And yet, historically, that spirit refuses to surrender.

Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.— Winston S. Churchill

History is orphan. It can speak, but cannot hear. It can give, but cannot take. Its wounds and tragedies can be read and known, but cannot be avoided or cured.

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

Rebuilding is something that is practically difficult than starting over from nothing.

History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

In the end, history proved the Jews correct. Across time and place, memory lives on the tenacity of a people’s resolve never to forget—not just with words—but with an endless stream of concrete actions rushing every day, every hour, every minute, every second.

Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.

She loved old things. The brown-brick place was a survivor of the 1907 earthquake and fire, and proudly bore a plaque from the historical society. The building had a haunted history- it was the site of a crime of passion- but Tess didn't mind. She'd never been superstitious.The apartment was filled with items she'd collected through the years, simply because she liked them or was intrigued by them. There was a balance between heirloom and kitsch. The common thread seemed to be that each object had a story, like a pottery jug with a bas-relief love story told in pictures, in which she'd found a note reading, "Long may we run. -Gilbert." Or the antique clock on the living room wall, each of its carved figures modeled after one of the clockmaker's twelve children. She favored the unusual, so long as it appeared to have been treasured by someone, once upon a time. Her mail spilled from an antique box containing a pigeon-racing counter with a brass plate engraved from a father to a son. She hung her huge handbag on a wrought iron finial from a town library that had burned and been rebuilt in a matter of weeks by an entire community.Other people's treasures captivated her. They always had, steeped in hidden history, bearing the nicks and gouges and fingerprints of previous owners. She'd probably developed the affinity from spending so much of her childhood in her grandmother's antique shop.

The oblivion, and I'll say even the historical error, are a key factor in the creation of a nation, to the extent that the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.

I believe that anytime someone messes with the mind, they mess with the soul. Historically they go hand-in-hand, for a long time ago, the word "mind" was another word for "soul". Contextually, people might not see the relationship between the mind and such events from the past and present, but there is a connection. They all involved tampering of the value of the mind.

Cattle did not have to be led to water. They came eagerly to the trough and drank while Almanzo pumped, then they hurried back to the warm barns, and each went to its own place. Each cow turned into her own stall and put her head between her own stanchions. They never made a mistake.Whether this was because they had more sense than horses, or because they had so little sense that they did everything by habit, Father did not know.

For me, the consolation of history resides in the fact that hypothetically returning to any point in time feels like coming home.

Here is a lesson to brand in fire across any young historian's mind: If you try to do too much, you will not do anything.

There must be something that God knows about fear that we don't know. I am sure He knows that when you are in a state of fear, you can't fix anything. When we are in a state of fear we can't talk about anything reasonable and we can't solve anything. That is the problem because the media throws all lies on us to create fear and we fall for it....Number one Satan's strategy of getting some people trapped.

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

The past is a reality that exists just beyond our reach.

…little people like me have to keep the true story alive. That way, when the revolution ends, and people come looking for the history, we can say, ‘Here it is – we kept it for you.

History is like a constantly changing tree.

With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made "legal." Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.

Fifty years of isolating Cuba has failed to promote democracy" Barack Obama, 44th and current President of the USA. "Let's move ahead!" Captain Hank Bracker

therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children.

It frustrates and fascinates me that we'll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we'll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.

We should, however, not forget that ethnic cleansing, especially of nonwhite Muslim peoples, has old historical roots in Russia. John Dunlop, for instance, reminds us that “in May 1856, Count Kiselev, minister of state domains, informed officials in the Crimea that Alexander [tsar Alexander II] was interested in ‘cleansing’ (Kiselev used the verb oshishchat’) Crimea of as many Tatars as possible.” That the tsarist empire was interested in annexing foreign lands, but not in annexing foreign peoples, was expressed by the famous remark of a tsarist minister that “Russia needs Armenia, but she has no need of Armenians.” [192]

Dates are convenient hooks on which we can hang our memories of events. But history is all about people - people like you and me who did things to change the world.

This is an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the gospels to grasp, but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus's birth at Bethlehem to be understood as historical fact. Luke would have had no idea what we in the modern world even mean when we say the word "history." The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.