Quotes About History

An elderly black man stepped forward and prayed aloud for Lincoln's safety. Much to Coffin's surprise, the President "lifted his own hat from his head and bowed to the old man."24

Esta Pérsia parecia tentar fazer de cada homem um cornudo, à vez

At first I asked myself—why would God talk to me? I'm not special. But then I thought—why not me? Maybe that's the point. What is history if not a mass grave filled with the bodies of followers of Special Men?

What is history if not a mass grave filled with the bodies of followers of Special Men? Maybe averageness and blandness is what we need right now.

The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.

Real popular culture is folk art - coalminers' songs and so forth.

The only justification for repressive institutions is material and cultural deficit. But such institutions, at certain stages of history, perpetuate and produce such a deficit, and even threaten human survival.

The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.

the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon.

In the world of old memories, there's no room for visitors

In the world of old memories, there's room for visitors

The only person to ever play golf on the moon was astronaut Alan Shepard. His golf ball was never found.

Each new generation, he thought, fails to learn from the one before.

To those who insisted that the lot of the free white laborer was worse than that of the slave, Frederick Douglass liked to point out that his old position on the plantation had been vacant since his departure, and encouraged them to apply.

Even in the free North, the initial turnover from black to Irish labor does not imply racial discrimination; many of the newly arrived Irish, hungry and desperate, were willing to work for less than free persons of color, and it was no more than good capitalist sense to hire them.

Os vivos comunicam-se mutuamente numa linguagem que, em grande medida, foi moldada pelos mortos. Assim, os mortos se vingam dos vivos por violarem seus valores.

It is difficult for the average person to achieve an historical perspective in which progress shall have been reduced to its proper dimensions.

May I remark that all we possess of Aristotle is what amounts to the school notebooks of his disciples, written in one of the most crabbed technical jargons in the history of the world, and totally unintelligible to any contemporary Greek who had not been through the discipline of the Lyceum? That this jargon has been sanctified by history, so that it has become itself an object of classical education, is not relevant; for this happened after Aristotle, not contemporaneously with him.

Most of us are too close to the idea of progress to take cognizance either of the fact that this belief belongs only to a small part of recorded history, or of the other fact, that it represents a sharp break with our own religious professions and traditions.

What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the result of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature which, on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature.

The place of the study of communication in the history of science is neither trivial, fortuitous, nor new. Even before Newton such problems were current in physics, especially in the work of Fermat, Huygens, and Leibnitz, each of whom shared an interest in physics whose focus was not mechanics but optics, the communication of visual images.

To discover the history of women and art is in part to account for the way art history is written. To expose its underlying values, its assumptions, its silences and its prejudices is also to understand that the way women artists are recorded is crucial to the definition of art and artists in our society.

Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.