Quotes About History

As the girls changed into their nineteenth-century sleepwear, they all agreed that the nightcaps should stay in the 1800s where they belonged.

Damn. It looks to me like I just missed the best reunion since Sherman got together with Atlanta.

And no matter what anybody says, I don't believe all this trouble started when women got the vote. As far as I'm concerned, it goddamn well got started when you taught each other how to read.

And wasn't that a great moment in baseball history," Holly Grace replied with withering sarcasm. "Helen Keller pitching and Little Stevie Wonder catching.

I know that nobody who has grown up in a Jewish environment can ever be not-a-Jew, whether the Jewishness he experienced was defined by his family's sense of history, by its religious observances, or, indeed, by the environment's attitudes toward Jews.

For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.

And yet, though in history the movement to restore eros to our idea of human nature and the movement for political liberation are parts of the same vision, we must make a distinction between the libertine's idea of liberty, 'to do as one likes,' and a vision of human 'liberation.

How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.

The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. … All history is taken in by stones.

Hugh had led men into battle with success and was on reasonably good terms with the king, though they would never be intimates; in any case, his father had been so close to his king that this would probably have to suffice for whole generations of Dipensers.

Readers accustomed to thinking of Piers Gaveston and Edward II as gay icons may have been surprised to learn that both men fathered out-of-wedlock children.

I have always believed that places with long history, especially those in which terrible events have taken place, retain something of those times, some trace in the air, just as I have been in many a cathedral all over the world and sensed the impress of centuries of prayers and devotions. Places are often filled with their own pasts and exude a sense of then, an atmosphere of great good or great evil, which can be picked up by anyone sensitive to their surroundings.

Her long life spanned American history from the colonial era to the eve of the Civil War, and she died as the last remaining widow of a Founding Father.

Once you admit that time past is actually infinite, being a child gradually fades out. ::: That this book is a history of a shadow that is a shadow of me mystically one in another Another another to subserve

The explicit distinction between those who are fit only to study and those who are history's actors not only expresses contempt for intellectuals but also denigrates anyone who requires evidence, rather than power and emotion, as justification for public policy.

Public ignorance and anti-intellectualism are not identical, of course, but they are certainly kissing cousins. Both foster the rise of candidates who regard a broad knowledge of history, science, and culture, and a decent command of their native language as political liabilities rather than assets—and who frequently try to downplay these qualities, even if they possess them, in order to pander to a public that considers conspicuous displays of learning a form of snobbery.

The cameras and the studio may not be following me, but my past definitely is.

your needs mean nothing to me. Just as history has proven that my needs mean nothing to you.

Does the soul have a passport? Or do you simply pick the branch of the family tree that you prefer, with its preferred location, and hang your history on it?

I think literature reveals more about us than history does.

I think this is the danger we face whenever time passes and those who have suffered recover from what flattened them. The generation coming up behind might underestimate or miss completely all that the older generation survived. Q.

we, as a society, archive our history. We don't want to forget where we've been and what we've seen. The past informs us, and can easily transform us, if we choose to let it. Q.

Everyone has a past, and everyone's past matters.

The past hadn't been erased just because a new future had been handed it.