Quotes About History

Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory...

When you raise the dead, they bring their baggage.

Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves." "I've

History had already done the really messy work, when Wintermute found him, sifting him out of all of the war's ripe detritus, gliding into the man's flat gray field of consciousness like a water spider crossing the face of some stagnant pool

This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.

It's more the way it is now than it's ever been," Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower's that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer.

I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,' she said. 'Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.

Power, in Case's world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn't kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory.

The watch is very old, purchased from a specialist dealer in a fortified arcade in Singapore. It is military ordnance. It speaks to the man of battles fought in another day. It reminds him that every battle will one day be as obscure, and that only the moment matters, matters absolutely. The enlightened warrior rides into battle as if to a loved one's funeral, and how could it be otherwise?

You're too young to remember it," Verity's mother said, "but we were expecting nuclear war all the time, really, up into my early thirties. Later, all of that felt unreal. But the feeling that things became basically okay turns out to have actually been what was unreal.

They built the first computers to crack German ice, right? Codebreakers. So there was ice before computers, you wanna look at it that way.

and the sort of Italian restaurant furniture, in dark welded steel, that might have belonged to any decade of the past hundred years.

Do we have a past, then?" Stonestreet asks. "History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when," Bigend says, his eyes narrowing. "Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who became extinct.

Something she'd gotten from Burton

They had remained silent during the trial, their leader stating only that the disease was God's vengeance on sinners and the unclean. Lean men with shaven heads and blank, implacable eyes, they were God's gunmen, and would stare, as such, from all the tapes of history, forever. But

Le epoche danno conforto soprattutto a chi non ne ha mai fatto un'esperienza diretta. Definiamo la storia a partire da una complessità che va ben oltre la nostra portata. E applichiamo delle etichette ai risultati. Attribuiamo a essi una denominazione. E poi parliamo di queste denominazioni come se fossero cose che esistono veramente.

the smell of her grandfather's fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall. Downstairs

I spent the war in Lisbon, you know," Deane said, putting the gun down. "Lovely place, Lisbon.

UN's got deep roots in the demonology.

Yet what it most nearly resembles, that place where history turns, is the Hole he has posited at the core of his being: an emptiness, as devoid of darkness as it is of light.

The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time.

We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.

He disliked the narrative aspects of history, particularly that part of it. People were so boringly deformed by it, like Ash, or else, like Lev, scarcely aware of it.

I dislike calling them stubs," Lowbeer said. "They're short because we've only just initiated them, by reaching into the past and making that first contact. We should call them branches, as they literally are.