Quotes About History

The dead govern the living.

Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.

History is a pageant and not a philosophy.

In terms of the history of a far reaching movement, 20 years is not that long.

All of it. Lincoln, Taft, what they did. The H-bomb, the RAND Corporation, the king of Persia, the whole long con of it all.

Early civilizations complained about still earlier ones, much as we do about both

Some say that this is the Israelis' original sin. With this I do not agree but I think we can call it Israel's immaculate misconception.

Both in Cuba and in the United states, the word 'freedom' comes up frequently in describing Cuba's history and current realities. It's a word that incorporates many different meanings. US policy makers tend to use it to refer to freedom for private enterprise, while for Cuban policy makers it generally means freedom from U.S interference.

In broad terms, culture may be viewed as the symbolic construction of the vast array of a social group's life experiences. Culture is the embodiment, the chronicle of a group's history

Sometimes your friends are your lovers, or have been at one time.

In every way, to read these books of Western history was sinning. Even the history of how modern states formed confronted me with the contradictions of my belief in Allah. The European separation of God's world from the state was itself haram. The Quran says there can be no government without God; the Quran is Allah's book of laws for the conduct of worldly affairs. In

Drinking wine and wearing trousers were nothing compared to reading the history of ideas.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

The veil of secrecy shrouding high-profile political assassinations in postindependence Pakistan has extended to information on the inner dynamics of its frenzied history.

With doubts about its ability to survive being expressed both within and outside its freshly drawn boundaries, Pakistan's insecurities were given full play in fashioning the nation's history. Using the "two- nation" theory as their crutch, state- sponsored historians wrote histories for schools and colleges as well as for more general consumption that highlighted the tyranny of the Hindu community in order to justify the creation of Pakistan.

Sudden and unexplained deaths of key politicians have been a recurring feature of Pakistani history since 1951. Often the reasons have been patently evident.

At the root of Pakistan's national identity crisis has been the unresolved debate on how to square the state's self- proclaimed Islamic identity with the obligations of a modern nation- state. This has been confounded by an official history that cannot explain the gaping inconsistencies between the claims of Muslim nationalism and the actual achievement of statehood at the moment of the British withdrawal.

Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?

It is precisely because of the unstable and unpredictable nature of life and history that we draw on fiction to lend in retrospect sense, unity, and dignity to fragmented lives and times.

Literature, as an institution par excellence of memory and a universally employed mode of human expression, untiringly explores ways of articulating who we are and of understanding both the incommensurability and the interconnectedness of our histories.

In addition to the emotive appeal of its eschatological promise, there was the tremendous attraction of Marxism as a cognitive framework for the interpretation of history and reality. With a largely justified reputation, Marxism functioned as a modern-day theology in the sense that it offered the best of minds a doctrine of very high level of intellectual sophistication with which to grapple, work, and identify.

the evidence suggests that hunter-gatherers in their evolutionary natural environment and evolutionary natural way of life, shaped in humankind's evolutionary history over millions of years, widely engaged in fighting among themselves. In this sense, rather than being a late cultural 'invention', fighting would seem to be, if not 'natural', then certainly not 'unnatural' to humans.

As Thomas Malthus pointed out, a new equilibrium between resource volume and population numbers would eventually be reached, recreating the same tenuous ratio of subsistence that has been the fate of most pre-industrial societies throughout human history.

The history of ideologies should teach modesty, or at least warn against fixations and biases.