Quotes About History

The good news, for Luke-Acts, is that the Holy Spirit moved headquarters from Jerusalem to Rome. The Holy Spirit, apparently, did not cross the Euphrates to the north or the Nile to the south but only the Mediterranean to the west. Each of those twin volumes, and one no more or less than the other, is theology rather than history. It is our problem if we wanted journalism. We received gospel instead.

The past is recorded almost exclusively in the voices of elites and males, in the viewpoints of the wealthy and the powerful, in the visions of the literate and the educated.

This is my working definition of history: History is the past reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse. There are times we can get only alternative perspectives on the same event. (There are always alternative perspectives, even when we do not hear them.) But history as argued public reconstruction is necessary to reconstruct our past in order to project our future.

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.

There was Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn… Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscraper. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will just glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.

And, like another Helen, fir'd another Troy.

Theirs was the giant race, before the flood.

In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin,Before polygamy was made a sin.

What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.

How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium and played on the grass.

There is a kind of character in thy life, That to the observer doth thy history, fully unfold.

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.

The longer they hang out, the deeper the history, the richer the life. If you use that as a template or as a way of realizing things, then I don't think you can go wrong.

history ... a sort of immortality turned upside down. Her life stretched backwards through ten centuries.

A little part of my life is built around ancient art.

For a million years the sound of making handaxes provided the percussion of everyday life. Anyone choosing a hundred objects to tell a history of the world would have to include a handaxe.

The past isn't fixed and frozen in place. Instead, its meaning changes as life unfolds.

I don't know any family that doesn't have a story somewhere. Besides, it you didn't have those things in life, you'd be so bland.

It's like that, I guess, when the past come to collect what you owe.

Literature makes history come to life. It is maybe the most accurate depiction of history, especially literature that was written in the time period depicted in the story.

It can be demonstrated from history that no society has ever survived after its family life deteriorated.

I'm crazy about Israel. It's full of life.

She supposed they were imperfections, those marks, but they didn't feel that way to her; they were a history, cut into his body: the map of a life of endless war.

All my life I have had a certain idea of France.