Quotes About History

Bütün hayat?m Ä°stanbul'un yak?l?p, y?k?l?p, tahrip edilip deÄŸiÅŸtirilmesinin hikayesidir. Bu, insan?n kendi hat?ralar?n?n, kendi hat?rlad?klar?n?n, baÄŸl? olduÄŸu sokaklar?n, çevrelerin, neredeyse haf?zas?na, ezberine ald??? görüntülerin yok edilmesi hikâyesidir ve benim için çok draml?, ac?l? ve a??r bir hikâyedir.

Here among the old stones and the old wooden houses, history made peace with it's ruins; ruins nourished life, and gave new life to history.

Our ancestors used to torture criminals before they executed them—it's in times like these that one truly understands the importance of tradition.

The story spoke to them in just the same way that Oedipus' murder of his father and Macbeth's obsession with power and death speak to people throughout the Western world. But now, because we've fallen under the spell of the West, we've forgotten our own stories. They've removed all the old stories from our children's textbooks. These days, you can't find a single bookseller who stocks the Shehname in all of Istanbul! How do you explain this?

to ''discover'' the city's soul in it's ruins, to see these ruins as expressing the city's ''essence'', you must travel down a long, labyrinth path strewn with historical accidents.

Museums should no longer concern themselves with history on a grand scale, the sagas of kings and heroes, or the forging of national identities; they should focus instead on the lives and belongings of ordinary people, just as modern novels do.

He may have merely read the travel journals of Evliya Chelebi

To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire gloom, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like an incurable disease. It is resignation that nourishes Istanbul's inward-looking soul.

Oysa hayat?m?zdaki utanç verici ÅŸeyler bir müzede sergilenirlerse, hemen gururlan?lacak ÅŸeylere dönüÅŸürler.

Is this the secret of Istanbul—that beneath its grand history, its living poverty, its outward-looking monuments, and its sublime landscapes, its poor hide the city's soul inside a fragile web?

What would he have to say about the Nabokov Museum in the same city, which during the Stalin era had served as the office of the domestic board of censors?

Had I been told Istanbul used to be a poorer, smaller and happier city, I might not have believed it, but that's what my heart told me.

Bizim askerler BaÅŸbakan Menderes'i daha o zamanlar asmam??t?; o da sabah akÅŸam Ä°stanbul'da Kadillak arabas?yla geziyor ve yolunu kesen bütün eski evleri ve konaklar? y?kt?r?p geniÅŸ caddeler açt?r?yordu.

Hegel je bio taj koji je prvi primijetio da su povijest i kazalište satkani od iste materije, rekao je Sunaj. Podsjetio je da - jednako kao i kazalište i povijest dodjeljuje uloge. I kao što na kazališne daske mogu istr?ati samo oni najhrabriji, i na pozornicu povijesti izlaze samo odabrani...

But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums.

Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; morals grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.

Books make it possible for every person born into the world to begin where the previous generation left off.

The word 'soviet' means 'council' in Russian (there was nothing particularly Communist about it until after 1917).

Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855)

This was one of the most revealing scenes of the whole revolution – one of those rare episodes when the hidden relations of power are illuminated on the surface of events and the broader course of history becomes clear.

According to a poll of 2005, 42 per cent of the Russian people, and 60 per cent of those over 60 years of age, wanted the return of a 'leader like Stalin'.

The overarching subject of all these works was Russia – its character, its history, its customs and conventions, its spiritual essence and its destiny. In a way that was extraordinary, if not unique to Russia, the country's artistic energy was almost wholly given to the quest to grasp the idea of its nationality.

The richest dynasties of the aristocracy had all stood near the summit of the Tsarist state during its great territorial expansion between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries and had consequently been rewarded with lavish endowments of fertile land in the south of Russia and Ukraine. These were the Sheremetevs and the Stroganovs, the Demidovs and Davydovs, the Vorontsovs and Yusupovs.

Petersburg did not grow up like other towns. Neither commerce nor geopolitics can account for its development. Rather it was built as a work of art.