Quotes About Events

Men who love power are not only dominated, as is generally supposed, by an appetite for wealth and honours. Above all they are influenced by an objective taste for the creation of events, for controlling their occurrence, for acting upon the world with effectiveness and for being always in the right. Wealth and honours are no more than the signs and tools of their influence.

The genesis of the whole by composition of the parts is fictitious. It arbitrarily breaks the chain of reciprocal determinations,..Each chronaxie is but one aspect of the total process; it is by abstraction that it is treated as a local event. In the nervous system there are only global events.

The perceptual synthesis is a temporal synthesis. Subjectivity, at the level of perception, is nothing other than temporality...In every moment of focusing, my body ties a present, a past, and a future together. It secretes time, or rather it becomes that place in nature where for the first time events, rather than pushing each other into being, project a double horizon of the past and future around the present and acquire a historical orientation.

By institution we were intending here those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequence or history--or again the events which deposit a sense in me, not just as something surviving or as a residue, but as the call to follow, the demand of a future.

History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other." [ 1880 ]

If you're a hermit, nothing ever happens in your life," he said. "If you're the opposite of a hermit, things happen.

Even impersonal events can be interpreted, and reacted to, as affronts to our self-esteem. The bus we wanted to catch had to be late; it had to go and rain when we had planned to play golf; traffic had to get into a snarl just when we needed to catch the plane. We react with anger, resentment, self-pity, or in other words, unhappiness.

How many events added up to a coincidence? How many coincidences added up to a conspiracy?

I do not believe that the desires of young boys cause catastrophic events. The actions of humans do.

There were events that stuck in my mind. One, for example, was the case of the missing palace seal at the beginning of winter.' 'Oh the poor animal,' she cried out, 'they're such beautiful creatures.' 'I'm speaking of the royal seal placed on correspondence, as you would know,' he said.

When I was eight years old," the priest-king confessed, "I wanted to be a god." The holy man looked around the ragged tent. "Perhaps this is my punishment, but between you and me, I do not believe that the desires of young boys cause catastrophic events. The actions of humans do.

My father believed in signs,' she says. 'Not that they change events or predict what's going to happen. It's more about what we do when we come across one.

In real life, weird stuff happens all the time.

Crises will come and go in all countries, more often in some than in others; at these moments, someone has to lead, has to make sure that while the crisis is addressed, it doesn't overwhelm the pre-existing agenda for change. Allow that, and failure beckons. Hence Harold Macmillan's famous lament about why he had not achieved more: 'Events, dear boy! Events.

John Comaroff, an anthropologist, has written that history is 'any succession of rupturing events which together bring to recognition our misunderstandings and misrecognition of the present'.

Even in those historical moments when men look back and see patriotism and sacrifice as the driving forces of history, 'the majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests.

Funny things happen to you in movies for silly reasons.

There were no words passing through their minds, though the scene of violence did play and replay itself, and their own roles within it grew more heroic with the colorations that time will give to the simplest of events.

The more competitors perceive the prospect of dogged, bitter retaliation to the point of severely hurting everyone's profits, the less likely they are of initiating the chain of events in the first place. This is analogous to the situation in which the robber says, "stick 'em up, I want your money," and the deranged-looking victim says "If you take it, I will explode this bomb and kill us both!

The notion that one must know history in order to understand the present has a certain justification when applied to the history of events, but not for the structural history of society. Rather, the opposite is the case: to examine the *constitution* of a particular social and economic structure, one has to be already familiar with the *completed* structure. Only then will one know what to look for in history.

Words matter, especially words defining complicated political arrangements, because they shape perceptions of the events of the past, attitudes toward policies being carried out in the present, and expectations about desirable directions for the future.

Great minds," Eleanor Roosevelt said, "discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." How big is your mind?

In mythic terms, the earth is a place of mystery and wonder where life always hangs by a thread and all the events of history are loosely stitched upon the endless loom of eternity. Secretly, we are each tied to the divine.

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.