Quotes About History

'Lincoln' is a powerful film. It's one of those epic films that talk about this very specific issue in history of the United States.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

Obviously, a big part of the American Revolution was there would be no Church of England the way there was in England. There was a specific attempt not to have an established church.

The president is the face of the State of Israel around the world: not a representative of a specific ideology but of the collective creativity and history of the Jewish people.

When I was trying to figure out how the government might go about creating the camps in 'The Darkest Minds,' I researched the Japanese internment camps here in the United States, specifically propaganda the government used, and how they capitalized on people's fears.

I've always wanted to see what Egypt was like when they were building the pyramids or Rome at the height of the empire or Greece - more specifically, Crete before it was destroyed. Why? Because I'm curious how we all hung out on a day to day basis, what was the chit chat, etc. Reading things in a book never gives you the feel.

I populated 'The Bourne Identity' with real characters from American history, specifically characters from the Iran-Contra affair, which my father ran the investigation of. But at the heart of it was a fictional character.

Nothing in our evolutionary history specifically prepared us to live in large societies. Almost everything about the way culture works does.

What I learned through my research is that the word 'actor,' specifically in reference to those who performed in plays, came about in the late 1500s as a non-gendered word. It applied to all people, regardless of anatomical sex or gender identity.

I actually have a history of doing quite a few period dramas, but I think I really specifically wanted to do the Regency era, and to be able to do high-society Regency era is even more amazing.

The most spectacular anti-lava effort in history occurred on the Icelandic island of Heimaey in 1973.

With the discovery of Zinjanthropus at Olduvai Gorge in 1959, my grandmother Mary Leakey pioneered the research in East Africa with my grandfather Louis. Many more spectacular fossil finds have since been made, both in Africa and elsewhere, by many researchers driven to understand our past.

Her continuity - you know, if you connect Harriet Tubman, who died in 1913, to Rosa Parks, born in 1913, you get this extraordinary spectrum of the African-American experience.

Some of the History Channel's documentaries involve docudrama segments and are highly speculative - but there seems, on the part of the producers, to be a real determination to get at the history behind our past - not the sex, which is left to drama shows and entertainment channels.

Why do we have financial crises? Why do banks lose money? If history is any guide, it hasn't often been the result of speculative bets. It has been the result of banks making loans to individuals and businesses who can't pay them back.

Lately I've been believing that music predates speech.

You're an old-timer if you can remember when setting the world on fire was a figure of speech.

To people like me, educated in post-war Britain, free speech has been a firm premise of the British way of life.

It is a historical error for those who were not there to just refer to August 28th as 'I Have a Dream' speech day. That is a real disservice to those who were there. It was a sad day. It was not a celebration environment.

I'm trying to learn the lessons of the past, but not to make speeches about the past.

Over the centuries, Chinese bureaucrats perfected the dark arts of emptiness to such an extent that when they deliver speeches these days, they often recite verbatim speeches that they have previously delivered, with the sparest of adjustments.

At some point early on, I realized that three of the greatest speeches ever delivered were by Winston Churchill, and they were written and delivered within a four-week period of each other.

I hated history in school. I couldn't understand why one has to learn, what someone did hundred years ago. Battles, speeches, forming a nation - was something that bored me.

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.