Quotes About History

Time-turner

I loved learning about the history of things

That's how it is in Faulkner's South: a land where the dead past walks, not was but is, and burning always in one's mind.

For the history of our shared country, he argues, is the history of the way white people have tried both to recognize and to deny the humanity of their black neighbors.

Absalom, Absalom! uses the fractured mind of a boy who seems already half-ghost to present the family history of "the son who widowed the daughter who had not yet been a bride." No one can read it quickly or even entirely with pleasure, but anyone who can hear its flowered dissonance will know that such books are why we read at all.

The Classical civilisation, which Greece originated, is the only civilisation which is spread out before us, from beginning to end.

It's been argued that for about 99.8 percent of our time on Earth, it was virtually impossible for us to regularly consume more than 15 percent of calories as fat.

We domesticated pigs and got whooping cough, domesticated chickens and got typhoid fever,894 and domesticated ducks and got influenza.

At the time of the American Revolution, we consumed about an estimated four pounds of sugar per person per year.1575 Now, we may each average more than fifty pounds annually.1576 That's the equivalent of about seventeen teaspoons of added sugars every day.

Your family history does not have to become your personal destiny. Just

The eight-a-day recommendation can be traced back to a 1921 paper in which the author measured his own urine and sweat output and determined he lost about 3 percent of his body weight in water a day, which comes out to about eight cups. Consequently, for the longest time, water requirement guidelines for humanity were based on just one person's urine and sweat measurements.

So for the first 90 percent of our hominoid existence, our bodies evolved on mostly plants.

My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.

Cairo is one of the greatest storehouses of human achievement on earth, ranging from the pharaonic through the Christian and Islamic periods to the Belle Epoque.

Cairo is an exploding modern metropolis which nevertheless preserves within its heart the finest medieval city in the world...

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have.

The intellectual is and only can be a militant, engaged as a singularity among others, embarked on the project of co-research aimed at making the multitude. The intellectual is thus not 'out in front' to determine the movements of history or 'on the sidelines' to critique them but rather completely 'inside.

I grew up reading Holocaust literature at the beach, Gulag literature on winter holidays, Vietnam memoirs on spring break.

The notion that one must know history in order to understand the present has a certain justification when applied to the history of events, but not for the structural history of society. Rather, the opposite is the case: to examine the *constitution* of a particular social and economic structure, one has to be already familiar with the *completed* structure. Only then will one know what to look for in history.

As one American major said, in a successful attempt at attaining history, "We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it."

Saigon remained, the repository and the arena, it breathed history, expelled it like toxin, Shit Piss and Corruption. Paved swamp, hot mushy winds that never cleaned anything away, heavy thermal seal over diesel fuel, mildew, garbage, excrement, atmosphere. A five-block walk in that could take it out of you, you'd get back to the hotel with your head feeling like one of those chocolate apples, tap it sharply in the right spot and it falls apart in sections. ?

Auschwitz was a much safer place to be than Dresden or any other city of any size in Germany from 1943 onward.

Not only does free trade have nothing to do with democracy, but in most cases throughout history the two have been inimical. Free trade prospered only at the expense of democracy and the freedom of the majority.