Quotes About History

We can no more get out of a relationship with nature than we can get out of history.

Too often science seems oblivious to the fact that human beings have been interacting with nature over a long period of time ... and that what we mean by nature is, to some extent, a product of that history.

Giving all due respect to the present generation of scientists who have worked hard to give us the most reliable account of nature they can, historians nonetheless find the scientific ideas of other eras intrinsically interesting, often as interesting as those of our own day, and for all we know, they are valid in their own way.

So we are making a pathway across the levee that separates nature from culture, science from history, matter from mind.

We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective.

A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system.

We live in an exaggerated present—we pay too much attention to recent experience and too little attention to the past, focusing on current events rather than long-term behavior.

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Donna Woolfolk Cross

Pope Joan was an excellent read.

To write without any awareness of a tradition you are trying to become a part of would be self-defeating. Every artist alive responds to the history of his or her art—borrowing, stealing, rebelling against, and building on what other artists have done.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I.

September 11 was terrible but, if one goes back over the history of the IRA, what happened to the Americans wasn't that terrible.

My father was in the First World War.

The word 'tip' comes from the mid-eighteenth-century innkeepers' sign 'to insure promptness.' Patrons deposited a few coins on the table before ordering a meal or drinks and were served faster.

The American system for building wealth has always taken wealth away from black Americans and given it to white American - beginning when enslaved blacks were stripped of their humanity and counted as the property that became the white wealth that still benefits white Americans and corporations today.

Who am I? Or possibly, who AM I? Make it who I WAS, because once I was somebody.

Every American carries in his bloodstream the heritage of the malcontent and the dreamer.

I'd taken a deep breath before asking about his relationship history. It was the start of this new part of our relationship, and the end of the fun we'd been having. Reality had just entered our world.

You can never compete with someone's first love.

Reviewing the history of official racial classifications reminds us that these categories are not natural—and neither are the institutional inequities that race undergirds.

Race persists because it continues to be politically useful.