Quotes About History

A lot of conversations happened during Obama's election that opened my eyes and made me really excited. He provided hope at a time when the country was grappling with its racial history, and we still need that hope.

Ever since Israel has been a nation the United States has provided the leadership. Every president down to the ages has done this in a fairly balanced way, including George Bush senior, Gerald Ford, and others including myself and Bill Clinton.

I think the whole DVD craze has provided opportunities for material that, for those interested in it, explains the whole history and background in getting a film made, which is great.

The Cold War provided justification for a larger peacetime military, since we were never really at peace, or so the argument went.

A precedent provides legal authority for an action precisely because it occurred before.

History provides a sense of where we've been and lessons that can be taken forward.

History provides an antidote to cynicism about the past.

The past could liberate or imprison - it creates a nation's character, provides the nourishment or the poison a people imbibe in their very marrow.

It's often difficult to slough off all that we've acquired, all the comforts and safety nets modern life provides for us, and realize that in those days, people were living very much on the edge - life was incredibly hard!

The Bible has no doubt had much influence in its time, but it provides very few laughs. None, in fact.

No humorist is under any obligation to provide answers and probably if you were to delve into the literary history of humour it's probably all about not providing answers because the humorist essentially says: this is the way things are.

When I was 17, I entered a modeling contest in my home province in China because my mother wanted me to learn better posture. And the rest is history!

You could grow up in Germany in the postwar years without ever meeting a Jewish person. There were small communities in Frankfurt or Berlin, but in a provincial town in south Germany, Jewish people didn't exist.

Washington presided at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and is often credited with its success. But he had no known part in drafting its provisions.

I also know that there have been many times in our history when the proximity of an election has induced exactly the kind of leadership and consensus-building that produce progress in our democracy.

In history, psychedelic plants were used by priests and shamans with a desire to discover the interior.

I always wanted to be an archaeologist or a psychiatrist.

Depression has existed as long as mankind itself, and certainly well before psychiatry, antidepressant medication, or the nation of America itself came into being.

There has always been a conscious effort to destroy any upliftment of the black race, whether that be physically, mentally, psychologically, morally, culturally, or economically.

If I had not become an actress, I would be a journalist or a psychologist: I like to analyze the mind and be involved in political moments that change history.

We historians are increasingly using experimental psychology to understand the way we act. It is becoming very clear that our ability to evaluate risk is hedged by all sorts of cognitive biases. It's a miracle that we get anything right.

Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.

I've always been interested in intellectual history and in psychology, and anxiety is obviously something that's been a big part of my life.

Although I often find that the feminist rhetoric - not feminism - can come across as simple-minded, self-regarding, nuance-averse and reductive - biology to physiology, history to psychology, procreation to gynecology, and so on - I have come to realize that we should all be feminists.