History Quotes - Page 56

Wilier races had interbred with human race during immemorial.Therefore no need to look for them on anywhere but in ourselves.

The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness. This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In the situation of the radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world— the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history, has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.

When humans began cultivating the land, they thought that the extra work this required will pay off. 'Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won't have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.' It made sense.If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan.The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children.Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases.They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.

When the purpose of clearly exposing the differences between the Aryan and the Tamil culture, civilization, conduct and creed Thirukkural was written. I am of that firm view.

It was after our breakfast that I was told to go up along with the parlour maid and serve the family breakfast. I was very nervous, but the parlour maid told me not to worry. So up I went, shaking in my boots, and into the breakfast room where the sideboard was laden with kidneys and rice and bacon and all sorts of delicious things. There were just four people at the table: three elderly men and a woman with a green parrot on her shoulder. Now, the thing about the parrot was that it had messed all down her shoulder and all down the front of her dress and she wasn't in the least bothered. She just smiled into the distance and every now and then fed the bird something from her hand.

If I should be available to everyone, I will eventually end up with nothing to give to anyone. So the greatest gift you can receive from me is my time. Count yourself lucky if I give you a minute of my hour.

He indeed who believes that by studying isolated histories he can acquire a fairly just view of history as a whole, is, as it seems to me, much in the case of one, who, after having looked at the dissevered limbs of an animal once alive and beautiful, fancies he has been as good as an eyewitness of the creature itself in all its action and grace.

...History is the key to the unity of a people. Its nostalgia pulls them together. Its gloom separates them further. Its successes make them stronger.

Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.

In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent.

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

Many think that the mark of a great champion is the nature and margin of their victories and the peaks they scale and reach. That’s only part of it. The mark of the greatest of champions is how they react and respond to defeat. That is when they become enshrined in our hearts and minds – as they rise again and into the immortal pages of history.

In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down.

We need a new ethic of place, one that has room for salmon and skyscrapers, suburbs and wilderness, Mount Rainier and the Space Needle, one grounded in history.

It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture, whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and with its necessary concomitant, a constant elevation of the standard of veracity, the end of the evolution of theology will be like its beginning—it will cease to have any relation to ethics. I suppose that, so long as the human mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual conceptions. The science of the present day is as full of this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the nescience of ignorant ages. The difference is that the philosopher who is worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law, and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols, while the ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality. So, it may be, that the majority of mankind may find the practice of morality made easier by the use of theological symbols. And unless these are converted from symbols into idols, I do not see that science has anything to say to the practice, except to give an occasional warning of its dangers. But, when such symbols are dealt with as real existences, I think the highest duty which is laid upon men of science is to show that these dogmatic idols have no greater value than the fabrications of men's hands, the stocks and the stones, which they have replaced.

History define humanity.

The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.

When Lincoln was asked if God was on the Union’s side, Lincoln’s unvarying response was that what was really important was whether they were on God’s side.

It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in …

Apparently some people (who don't know history) seem to think that marriage 'always has been' exclusively between males and females - and that this modern inequality somehow justifies the enforced continuation of this inequality.

Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then—fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work— What are these Martians? What are we? I answered, clearing my throat.

Even though it may look like the wicked is gaining ground, God is still in control. We need to pray for our nations, pray for others, pray for forgiveness and mercy over people. We need to love no matter who we are talking to, whether they are Atheist, Moslems, Lesbians, Homosexuals or Pagans. We need to love them and share the love of God with them and not judge and see if we can rebuild our broken nations.

Media is so influenceable, yet so influent. Whoever controls the media controls the society, and its opinion.

My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.

Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.

Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probably that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books.

Only if we understand our past, can we move forward to a brighter future.

No matter what your history has been, your destiny is what you create today. What are you going to create?

The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma

Waves crack with wicked fury against me ship's hull while ocean currents rage as the full moon rises o're the sea." (Cutthroat's Omen: A Crimson Dawn)

Much of what we call History is the success stories of madmen.

He who doesn't understand history is doomed to repeat it.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

Life and history have repeatedly taught us that values and virtues are far much stronger than the physical wealth we often see. For material wealth emanates from values and virtues.

I smelled war on the horizon, with more deaths and trouble to come" Bombing of the Twin TowersFrom Rape of a Nation by Sara Niles

There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past.

Never question the power of one! Throughout history it has been the actions of only one person who has in inspired the movement of change.

Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don't remember it.

In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou know not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.

Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.

Political judgment is the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.

Indebtedness among historians is a peculiar thing, however. We don’t simply, in mechanical fashion, inherit a body of knowledge, add something to it, and pass it on. We also question, test, and shake here and there the intellectual scaffolding surrounding our predecessors’ work, in the full, ironic knowledge that someone else is going to come along and give the scaffolding surrounding our own work a good shake, too, that no historian, in short, is ever permitted the final word.

As history has also shown, especially in the twentieth century, one of the first things an ideologue will do after achieving absolute power is kill.

It was a symposium of horror and heroism, the like of which has not been known in the civilized world since man established his dominion over the sea.

Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd her one way and then the other and then finally trap her in contradictions of which she can make no sense.

Our history, America’s history, has been so heavily edited. In history classes, we don’t really go into full discussions about the past. People, struggles, and triumphs have been erased. As a result, we now have a generation, my generation, of people who are intelligent but ignorant of and blind to the truth.

Ten men shouting will control ten thousand who choose to remain silent.

In essence the renaissance is simply the green end of one of civilization's hardest winters.

Just this past summer, I took online courses in introductory logic and law through civilization. Often the weight of history, with its facts heaped upon facts requiring complex chains of inference to sort through – I mean complex for someone with the soft brain of a tomato merchant; for me the premises are obvious and the conclusions dire and inescapable – threatened to crush me, and I was ultimately forced to abandon the whole undertaking. By way of recovery, I spent the rest of the summer immersed in a Freudian meditation on some choice tabloids. The mysterious lives of celebrities make for challenging induction. The reasoning process involves navigating many gaps in our knowledge of them. What is certain is that under the iceberg of glitz and glamor lie neurotic, depraved individuals with bizarre habits and hobbies, people who think they’re above the law.

In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.

[Today's high schoolers are required to read] a couple of Shakespeare plays...the couple of Shakespeare plays function as an inoculation – that is, you get exposed to 'half-dead Shakespeare virus', and it keeps you from ever loving Shakespeare again, your whole life long. It would be much better if they didn't do that at all!Because [the students] have no linguistic preparation for it, and no cultural or historical preparation for it. They've not been reading English poetry, so the language strikes them as completely bizarre […] and they have no historical place to put it, so they don't know what's going on. All they know is that they're 'supposed to like it'.

Tom smiled at the Fleming — a bright, friendly smile — and bobbed his head courteously. That confused the jolt-head. Then, by way of making conversation while his confederates gained their positions, he said, "I suppose someone must have told you — your mother, perhaps, or your father, though I doubt you ever knew him — that you're an idle-headed canker. A rank pustule? No? Not even an irksome, crook-pated, pathetical nit?"The Fleming, his face as red as hot steel, roared and swung a fist like a blacksmith's hammer.

Only the dead remember the truth.

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.

History is more or less bunk.

And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.

Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.

The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but it is to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly. A well organized society is one in which we know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one in which we tell pleasant lies about ourselves.