Quotes About History

In those days the planes had propellers and couldn't make the trip nonstop and, worst of all, traveled through the sky.

I'm down here looking at the Potomac River; they say George Washington threw a silver dollar across it once. It looks a little bit too far for me to do that trick, but maybe he could. After all, a dollar went further in those days.

My study of history had taught me that humanity has always been full of illusions about its own possibilities, and that ambitious leaders have led their people into deep affliction more often than wide empire. Then

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided. Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian.

Let that be a reminder to you that the past is one thing, but what we make of it, the conclusions we draw, is another. History can be many things, depending on how we read it, just as the future can be many things, depending on how we live it. There is no inevitability to any historical occurrence, only what people will allow to take place. And it is by dreaming first that we get to new realities.

Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.

Language is the gateway to the human world. (...) Language is far older than civilization. (...) The fact that it is possible to teach apes to ride bicycles, but impossible to teach them to talk, suggests that it is the use of language rather than the use of tools which is the essential characteristic of humanity. The word, not the sword or the spade, is the power that has created human culture.

Nowhere is this idea of divine revelation so strongly expressed or so clearly identified with the tradition of culture as in the case of Israel. For here the whole social form and historical destiny of the people had been imposed on them by the Word of Yahveh, which was not merely, as in other cases, a sacred tradition of learning, but a way of life embodied in a moral law and a sacred history which set it apart from all the other peoples of the ancient world.

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

'Bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age' was quite a favourite headline for some wobbly liberals. The slogan does all the work. But an instant's thought shows that Afghanistan is being, if anything, bombed out of the Stone Age.

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.

The past is just something that's over.

The God who walks the paths of history through the pages of the Bible pins a mission statement to every signpost on the way.

It is instructive (and sometimes properly humbling) to give thought to that great stream of tradition within which we stand, rather than fondly imagine we are the first generation to face the challenge the Old Testament sets before us as Christians.

It is always perilous to suppose that the past is over and done with or that it can ever safely be disconnected from the pressing concerns of the present.

history should continually seek to challenge our assumptions. It should prompt us to look differently at the world and make us less self-assured about our own ideals and beliefs.

One of the architects of what is now the world's only superpower was Thomas Jefferson.

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ileum?

The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then rouse themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that could last not two miles, not two hours, but two full days. According to the Mexican historian Francisco Almada, a Tarahumara champion once ran 435 miles, the equivalent of setting out for a jog in New York City and not stopping till you were closing in on Detroit.

You could literally halt epidemics in their tracks with this one remedy," he said. He flashed two fingers up in a peace sign, then slowly rotated them downward till they were scissoring through space. The Running Man. "So simple," he said. "Just move your legs. Because if you don't think you were born to run, you're not only denying history. You're denying who you are.

E atat de simplu. Trebuie doar sa-ti misti picioarele. Pentru ca, daca nu intelegi ca te-ai nascut pentru a alerga, nu-ti negi doar istoria, iti negi propria fiinta.