Quotes About History

It is deeply conservative to suggest that any sufficiently difficult woman from history -- say, one who rebelled against the constraints of femininity by dressing and acting in a masculine way -- must have been a man.

We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.

I'd wanted to escape history by running to the hawk. Forget the darkness, forget Göring's hawks, forget death, forget all the things that had been before. But my flight was wrong. Worse than wrong. It was dangerous. I must fight, always, against forgetting.

We so often think of the past as a something like a nature reserve: a discrete, bounded place we can visit in our imaginations to make us feel better. I wonder how we could learn to recognise that the past is always working on us and through us, and that diversity in all its forms, human and natural, is strength.

And I found there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom.

so that new things I encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past.

History and hawks and hoods and the implications of taking something's sight away to calm it.

Wild things are made from human histories.

I think of all the complicated histories that landscapes have, and how easy it is to wipe them away, put easier, safer histories in their place.

When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is and all of it falling apart. Endings. Worlds dissolving. Weather systems, baking systems, the careful plans of municipal gardeners. Families, hearts, lives.

one honey fungus in Oregon covers almost four square miles and is thought to be nearly two and a half thousand years old.

This region was the centre of the flint industry in Neolithic times. And later, it became famous for rabbits farmed for meat and felt.

You don't know anything about them, but you feel the other person's there, one friend told me. It's like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow. History

Yes, the Americans and the British were alike in some things. They were surface people, skimming over past history, picking out the interpretations that pleased them, never digging deep for the truths that could warn them. When they found something unpleasant, they would forget it within months. They even prided themselves on not remembering; forget and forgive were so much easier. They evaded serious ideas, unless they approved of them.

Bölgelerin sahip oldu?u bütün o karma??k tarihleri ve onlar? silmenin, yerlerine daha basit, daha güvenli tarihler koyman?n ne kadar kolay oldu?unu dü?ünüyorum.

It was important for a Roman of this period to get his Greek mythology right. Being able to identify who was who and what was what was a sign that the viewer was a person of culture and status.

If 'myth' is a slippery term, so is 'classical'. It is common shorthand for 'ancient Greek and Roman'. But this shorthand has a history, and a bias.

It is part of Elvis's enduring fascination to so many that his life story is always more than that; it is also a take (celebratory, critical, twisted) upon the American dream. To think about Elvis is to think about America: its history and its values.

Reading myth as crystallizing historical fact was a common approach in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But it is an approach to myth that is fraught with problems. It ignores or takes insufficient account of how mythic narratives are exploited for political purposes.

Sometimes you laughed, and then my glove puppet would weep piteously. When you took the glove puppet he alternated between flirtatious and suicidal, hell-bent on flinging himself from great heights and out of the windows. I noticed that you didn't make a voice or a history for the puppet, but you became its voice and history. I'd have liked to admire that but felt I was watching a distressing form of theft, since the puppet could do nothing but suffer being forced open like an oyster.

I had to give her a C because she spoilt an otherwise thoughtful piece by suddenly concluding that the Church of England was Anne Boleyn's "fault." A Church is not the "fault" of anybody.

I cannot believe in a God who metes out hurt for hurt, pain for pain, torture for torture. Nor do I believe that God invests human representatives with such power to torture and kill. The paths of history are stained with the blood of those who have fallen victim to "God's Avengers." Kings and Popes and military generals and heads of state have killed, claiming God's authority and God's blessing. I do no believe in such a God.

History may have condemned him many times over for being a weak and reactionary tsar, but he was, without doubt, the most exemplary of royal fathers.

Helen Rappaport