Quotes About History

You can't understand where someone's going unless you understand where they've been.

Too often, however, we tend to read these accounts merely as biblical history without relating them to our lives and our situations. But

We cannot separate the history of a nation from the people of that nation.

God recorded in His Word specific instances of His sovereign rule over history in order that we might trust Him in the affairs of history as they unfold before us today.

And we should remember that God works in history from an eternal perspective, whereas we tend to view the outworking of history from a temporal perspective.

our innate tendency to think our country is always right. We assume that God will bless our side with victory. The Bible does not support such a view. In fact, according to biblical history, God sometimes uses an evil nation to punish another one, then in turn punishes the first nation for its sin.

Gaylord Perry and Willie McCovey should know each other like a book. They've been ex-teammates for years now.

Last night's homer was Willie Stargell's 399th career home run, leaving him one shy of 500.

Which is the point: the future looks a lot more like the past than you might expect.

Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, by Walker Evans (version published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). From a print in a private collection, trimmed under Evans's direction and signed by him in 1971.

America today remembers its history through visual imagery. Film, print, and electronic media are very capital intensive, which means that most Americans are consumers, not producers, of the images through which they remember.

No one," Ben noted, "would have known about James Chaney if he had been by himself.

I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.

Mr. Prince, would you like to know the most significant event in the history of freedom?" "The American Revolution?" "A defensible choice, a close second even, but not mine. I would choose the moment when the Roman plebians required the patricians to write down the twelve tables of the law and put them where everyone could see them -- thereby proclaimed the law supreme over the politicians. The rule of law is the essence of freedom.

Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease.

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

Our culture now wonderfully, alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I've ever seen them before.

The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States it is arguably the finest anywhere.

Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts.

A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.

Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You're also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.

Latin is already a dead language, man... don't make it any deader.

Heart and head are contrary historians.