Quotes About History

they believe the "Negro race" is less evolved than Caucasians, and less worthy as humans. The existence of Pygmies, evolutionists felt, made a lie of the Genesis teaching that all men are brothers, all descendants of Adam and Eve. What further proof did they need than a living, breathing, evolutionary link who was clearly not the equal of white men but was more than just a monkey?

The more paleontological discoveries that are made, the more that we realize our knowledge of dinosaur types is fairly complete, and no ancestral forms ever will be found because they do not exist.

This was the start of a period that blurs as I try to recall it. Incidents seem to cascade and merge. Events become feelings, fellings become events. Head and heart are contrary historians.

Events become feelings, feelings become events. Head and heart are contrary historians.

He thinks they may also imitate the sounds of birds that are no longer around. He thinks the sounds of extinct birds are passed down the years from mockingbird to mockingbird... He says when a mockingbird sings, for all we know it's pitching fossils into the air. He says who knows what songs of ancient creatures we may be hearing out there.

This man's name was Stalin. In the portraits and photographs he had a kind face and compassionate eyes. He looked like a loving grandfather or uncle, long unseen, wanting to take you into his arms. Gavrila read and told me many stories about Stalin's life. At my age young Stalin already had fought for the rights of the underprivileged, resisting the centuries-old exploitation of the helpless poor by the pitiless rich.

The Kiowa didn't scalp, and the real Mescalero did not live in pueblos, but factual accuracy, for May, was something that happened to other writers).

These are the ruins of our memories, which loom in our minds like the Parthenon, even as they are decayed and weathered by time and regret.

He wondered if the German girl ever knew that someone had loved her so much that he painted her twice on the cold cement wall of a machine-gun pillbox.

Stories are nations, empires.

Spokane is old, and it is beautiful like old things are, lit from within by nostalgia and hard times.

She was her own kind of dreamer, a blind mathematician skating along the thin surface of life, believing in the saving power of logic, reason, and information, overlooking the whole murky expanse of feeling and animal instinct that was the real driver of human behavior, the real author of history.

She was her own kind of dreamer, a blind mathematician skating along the thin surface of life, believing in the saving power of logic, reason, and information, overlooking the whole murky expanse of feeling and animal instinct that was the real driver of human behavior, the real author of history. Since

tour guide tells them that after the Taj was completed, each of the builders, twenty-two thousand men, had his thumbs cut off so that the structure could never be built again.

She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day's headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her from breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It's a version of Bela's definition, in childhood, of yesterday.

befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happened to share.

She refused to think of it as an arranged marriage but knew in her heart that that was what it was. In Rome, she communicated with Navin by e-mail and spoke to him a few times on the phone, conversations heavy with the weight of things to come but lacking the foundation of any lived history between them.

James Joyce wrote the definitive work about Dublin while he was living in Switzerland. We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.

There is a direct line relationship between what happened in Afghanistan in the work up to 11 September 2001 and what we're doing in Afghanistan today.

The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.

Here is a pretty good rule of thumb for Democratic Presidents: if it didn't work for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who won four terms and a World War, it probably won't work for you either.

Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

As a fiction writer, of course, you need to take some leeway with certain aspects of history to make the story work.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.