Quotes About History

He told me that all whites knew they were devils—"especially Masons.

I want you to just watch and see if I'm not right in what I say: that the white man, in his press, is going to identify me with 'hate.' He will make use of me dead, as he has made use of me alive, as a convenient symbol of 'hatred'- and that will help him to escape facing the truth that all I have been doing is holding up a mirror to reflect, to show, the history of unspeakable crimes that his race has committed against my race.

To the very end, Malcolm sought to refashion the broken strands between the American Negroes and African culture. He saw in this the road to a new sense of group identity, a self-conscious role in history, and above all a sense of man's own worth which he claimed the white man had destroyed in the Negro.

This admittedly simplified description of society as an assemblage of assemblages should serve as a reminder of how misleading it is to view human history as comprising a single temporal flow. Indeed, given that even at the largest scales (territorial states, world-economies) we never reach a point at which we may coherently speak of 'society as a whole', the very term 'society' should be regarded as a convenient expression lacking a referent.

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.

Look at the past—empire succeeding empire—and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events. Which is why observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand. Would you really see anything new?

All things fade into the storied past, and in a little while are shrouded in oblivion.

Consider the past; such great changes of political supremacies. Thou mayest foresee also the things which will be. For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of the things which take place now: accordingly to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more wilt thou see?

Close to forgetting it all, close to being forgotten.

all things soon pass away and become a mere tale, and complete oblivion soon buries them. And I say this of those who have shone in a wondrous way.

as the heaps of sand piled on one another hide the former sands, so in life the events which go before are soon covered by those which come after.

49. Look at the past—empire succeeding empire—and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events. Which is why observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand. Would you really see anything new?

We too will inevitably end up where so many eloquent orators have gone, so many distinguished philosophers (Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates), so many heroes of old, and so many generals and tyrants

Look at the past with its endless succession of empires, and you see the future.

Look at the past—empire succeeding empire—and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events.

The notions of biblical infallibility and inerrancy first appeared in the 1600s, and became insistently affirmed by some Protestants only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I have been told that the German novelist Thomas Mann defined a myth (a particular kind of metaphorical narrative) as "a story about the way things never were, but always are." So, is a myth true? Literally true, no. Really true, yes.

Modern biblical literalism with its emphasis on factuality is not only very different from what "the literal meaning of a text" has meant for most of Christian history; it also has consequences that minimally are unfortunate and unnecessary and more seriously obscure and distort what the Bible and being Christian are about. Indeed, it discredits the Bible and Christianity in the minds of many people.

Jesus, then, was not just a prophet announcing the kingdom. He believed that the kingdom was breaking in to Israel's history in and through his own presence and work. This is the third layer of my historical portrait of his mission and message.

In short, the portrait of Jesus as a Spirit person is history remembered and not simply history metaphorized. This is the basis for my claim that Jesus was a Jewish mystic: for him, God was an experiential reality. He knew the immediacy of the sacred in his own experience. And this claim leads to a second claim: Jesus' experience of God was foundational for the rest of what he was.

As I have argued elsewhere, we actually know more securely that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish prophet announcing the kingdom of God than we know almost anything about the history of traditions that led up to the production of the gospels as we have them.5

I am not among the relatively few scholars who think that only that which is historically factual matters.

Two statements about the nature of the gospels are crucial for grasping the historical task: (1) They are a developing tradition. (2) They are a mixture of history remembered and history metaphorized. Both statements are foundational to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins, and both need explaining

Biblical inerrancy and the absolute authority of the Bible are thus a post-Reformation Protestant development. The first time the Bible was described as "inerrant" and "infallible" was in a book of Protestant theology written in the second half of the 1600s. Widespread affirmation of biblical inerrancy is even more recent, largely the product of the past one hundred years.