Quotes About History

I don't chart out the life histories of the people I play. If I did, I'd be in trouble. I work with my heart and my head, and naturally emotions follow.

The greatest work of an artist is the history of a painting.

My face has changed with the years and has enough history in it to give audiences something to work with.

Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.

In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm an artist. I've chosen to work in history the way someone might choose to work in still lifes or landscapes.

the most comfortable characteristic of the period [1775-1825], and the one which incites our deepest envy, is the universal willingness to accept a good purpose as a substitute for good work.

The real story of the settlement of the West was work, not conquest

Mr. Gorbachev has apparently stumbled onto one of the best-kept secrets in recent Soviet history: Communism doesn't work.

Your best work involves timing. If someone wrote the best hip hop song of all time in the Middle Ages, he had bad timing.

Every work of art is the child of its time, often it is the mother of our emotions.

I would tell myself that I was about to address the largest mass assembly of idiots ever gathered in the history of mankind.

But, if recent history has taught us anything, it's that self-regulation doesn't work in finance, and that worries about reputation are a weak deterrent to corporate malfeasance.

Again I entered my smithy to work and forge something from the noble material of time past.

Raking over the past and sifting its dust is an occupation for the idle or the elderly retired.

Most archivists don't like surprises. That's why we work in the past.

To me, the difference between mythology and real history is that the real history has to tell a kind of believable story of how things happened. The physics has to work.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work. I am the grass. I cover all.

We can be creative and generate new breakthroughs, if we're willing to work with ideas from the pool of history - both distant and more recent - despite the potential for our experiments to fail.

There's a need to keep the history of an artform going, parallel with the new work that's being done.

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

Each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And it's in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written.

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one's scapegoats.

The future works out great men's destinies; The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever.