c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Something, which the police called a bomb, had exploded in his shed. Investigations were begun, and the efforts of the authorities were soon to be categorized by the appropriate officals as "feverish", for bombs began to go off all over the place. The police collected fragments of the exploded bombs, and the press, anxious to help the police in their work, published impressive pictures of the fragments as well as a drawing of a reconstructed bomb together with a very detailed description of how it had been made.The police had done a really first-rate job. Even my brother and myself, both of us extremely untalented men in technical matters, could easily grasp how the bomb makers had gone to work. A large quantity of ordinary black gunpowder, such as is the be found in the cartridges sold for shoutguns, was encased in plasticine; in it was embedded an explosive cap, of the type used in hand grenades during the war, at the end of a thin wire; the other end of the wire was joined to the battery of a pocket flashlight -- obtainable at any village store -- and thence to the alarm mechanism of an ordinary alarm clock. The whole contratation was packed into a soapbox. Of course my brother did his duty as a journalist.He published the police report, together with the illustrations, on page one. It was not my brother's doing that this issue of the paper had a most spectacular success and that for weeks men were still buying it; no. the credit for that must go to the police; they had done their bit to ensure that the peasantry of Schleswig-Holstein would have a healthy occupation during the long winter evenings. Instead of just sitting and indulging in stupid thoughts, or doing crossword puzzles, or assembling to hear inflamatory speeches, the peasantery was henceforth quetly and busily engaged in procuring soapboxes and alarm clock and flashlight batteries.  And then the bombs really began to go of.... Nobody ever asked me what I was actually doing in Schleswig=Holstein, save perhaps Dr. Hirschfeldt, a high official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, who had recently taken to frequenting Salinger's salon. Occasionally, and casually, he would glance at ne with his green eyes an honour me with a question, such as: "And what are the peasants up to in the north?" To which I would usually only reply: "Thank you for your interest. According to the statistics, the standard of living is going up -- in particular, there has been in increased demand for alarm clocks.
— Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen
During World War II the top secret “Norden XV” or “Blue Ox” otherwise known the Army Airforce’s “Norden M Series Bombsights,” were used up to and including the Vietnam War by all American military aircraft with bomb carrying capabilities. This bombsight was considered a “Canonical Tachometric Design” meaning that it had the ability to measure the aircraft's direction and ground speed. In time the Norden improved its original design by using a computer that constantly calculated the aircraft’s flight characteristic and external wind forces to determine the bomb's impact point. When the B-17 Flying Fortress was designed, it came equipped with a Sperry A-3 Autopilot that only corrected angular deviations in the aircraft’s straight and level course. In time most bombsights were replaced by video displays on the instrument panel. Dumb or gravity bombs were mostly replaced with in-flight guidance bombs, such as laser-guided bombs or those using a GPS system. The last combat use of the Norden bombsight was by the US Navy during the covert “Operation Igloo White” mission when OP-2E Neptune aircraft dropped electronic sensors to detect enemy activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Project CHECO Southeast Asia Report was declassified on May 5, 2013.
— Captain Hank Bracker, "Suppresed I Rise"
A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.
— George W. Bush
It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done.
— Mitch Landrieu
The truth of history lies simultaneously in the substratum of created existence (since all beings are the willed realizations of God's love); in the fulfillment of the future of history (since God's love, in His will and its expressions - namely, created existence - is identifiable with the final communion of creation with the life of God); and in the incarnate Christ (since on God's part the personification of this loving will is the incarnate Christ). Whereby Christ becomes the "principle" and "end" of all things, the One who not only moves history from within its own unfolding but who also moves existence even from within the multiplicity of created things, toward the true being which is true life and true communion.
— John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church
Historical periodization always tells a story. It is a narrative device for putting meaning into the flux of historical process - creating protagonists, heroes, pace, and plot. For this reason, the division of history into periods always carries an ideological load, and it is a methodological imperative to approach questions of broad historical periodization with this in mind.
— James   Ferguson
Something inexorable seeds itself in the place of your origin. You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel.
— Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World
The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare, this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias, and the freedom of young men to defy tribal elders.77 As we shall see in the next chapter, this development is a countercurrent to the historical decline of violence, but it is also a demonstration of the role of Leviathans in propelling the decline.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” 79 So why did our foraging ancestors leave Eden? For many, it was never an explicit choice: they had multiplied themselves into a Malthusian trap in which the fat of the land could no longer support them, and they had to grow their food themselves. The states emerged only later, and the foragers who lived at their frontiers could either be absorbed into them or hold out in their old way of life. For those who had the choice, Eden may have been just too dangerous. A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple of inches in height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
I returned from the West, and brought home in my nostrils and nerves that benumbing lethargy, imprudent hostility, and arrogant superiority with which the West viewed the fate of Eastern Europe.
— Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary, 1944-1948
The study of history can be sobering and shocking, and morally troubling. One does not have to believe in original sin to do it successfully, but it probably helps. By relentlessly placing on display the pervasive crookedness of humanity's timber, history brings us back to earth, equips us to resist the powerful lure of radical expectations, and reminds us of the grimmer possibilities of human nature--possibilities that, for most people living in most times, have not been the least bit imaginary. With such realizations firmly in hand, we are far better equipped to move forward in the right way.
— Wilfred M. McClay, Students Guide To U.S. History: U.S. History Guide
So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate power in the 1990s as the baby boomers became the establishment. Their targeting of rape, battering, hate crimes, gay-bashing, and child abuse reframed law-and-order from a reactionary cause to a progressive one, and their efforts to make the home, workplace, schools, and streets safer for vulnerable groups (as in the feminist “Take Back the Night” protests) made these environments safer for everyone.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Most of his face had been hidden by long, greasy bangs, and he mumbled in a low voice that made him difficult to understand. From what little Kyosuke had been able to make out, Usami had killed one person, but he mostly spent his time at the podium reciting strange names that Kyousuke didn't recognize like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ed Gein... Maybe they're actors?
— Mizuki Mizushiro, サイコメ 1 殺人鬼と死春期を
He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist.
— Tracy Kidder, Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
There is a certain seductiveness about what is dead. It will retain all those admirable qualities of life with none of that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection. You can auction it, museum it, collect it. It’s much safer to be a collector of curios, because if you are curious, you have to sit and sit and see what happens. You have to wait on the beach until it gets cold, and you have to invest in a glass-bottomed boat, which is more expensive than a fishing rod, and puts you in the path of the elements. The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Numerous times throughout history, a single person has made a tremendous impact on the world. I don’t know why anyone would think that can’t still happen.
— Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting.(Hari Kunzru)
— Carolina De Robertis, Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times
History will remember him as a savage, but that's because we write the histories.
— A.H. Septimius, Crowns Of Amara: The Return Of The Oracle
Well, that was one thing you had to give [Makann] credit for. He wanted to run out the Gilgameshers. Everybody was in favor of that.Now, Trask could remember something he'd gotten from Harkaman. There had been Hitler, back at the end of the First Century Pre-Atomic; hadn't he gotten into power because everybody was in favor of running out the Christians, or the Moslems, or the Albigensians, or somebody?
— H. Beam Piper, Space Viking
The historian Meike Wöhlert has analyzed and compared the judgments rendered by courts responsible for malicious acts of treason in five cities. Although her research only deals with registered cases and not unofficial ones, the results suggest that the telling of political jokes was a mass phenomenon beyond state control. In 61 percent of official cases, joke-tellers were let off with a warning, alcohol consumption often being cited as an extenuating circumstance. (People who had had one too many in bars were considered only partially responsible for their actions, and because most of the popular jokes that made it to court had been told in bars, the verdicts were accordingly lenient.)
— Rudolph Herzog, Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
The historical record contradicts the assumption that the Nazis sentenced large numbers of people to death during World War II for telling jokes. In the final phase of the Third Reich, some cases did receive capital sentences, but they were extreme exceptions to the rule. (We will return to them later.) The compilations of jokes that circulated in Germany after the war bore titles like Deadly Laughter and When Laughter Was Dangerous, but there is not much evidence that the jokes they contained were inevitably risky for the teller.
— Rudolph Herzog, Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
Finally, my watchers had to fess up. In embarrassed and genuinely polite tones, they said they had no other choice but to arrest me. Then they accompanied me to the prison across the way. As I entered, an extremely tall SS man leapt in front of me and asked: “Do you have any weapons?” “Why?” I responded. “Do I need any?
— Rudolph Herzog, Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
Comrades, we are going to try to cheer you up, and our sense of humor will help us in this endeavor, although the phrase gallows humor has never seemed so logical and appropriate. The external circumstances are exactly in our favor. We need only to take a look at the barbed wire fences, so high and full of electricity. Just like your expectations.And then there are the watchtowers that monitor our every move. The guards have machine guns. But machine guns won’t intimidate us, comrades. They just have barrels of guns, whereas we are going to have barrels of laughs.You may be surprised at how upbeat and cheerful we are. Well, comrades, there are goods reasons for this. It’s been a long time since we were in Berlin. But every time we appeared there, we felt very uneasy. We were afraid we’d get sent to the concentration camps. Now that fear is gone. We’re already here.
— Rudolph Herzog, Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
On April 1, armed SA men took up positions in front of Jewish businesses and tried to prevent customers from spending money in them. Some troops painted anti-Semitic slogans and Stars of David on display windows; others were content to hold up signs calling for a boycott and to curse at Jewish businessmen. Some areas also saw looting and acts of violence.All in all, this display of activism made a very negative impression on most people, and the thuggish SA men with their uneducated bellowing were left even less popular among the general population than they had been before. Although very few Germans openly declared their solidarity with their Jewish fellow citizens, the boycott did not, as it was intended to do, set German gentiles against German Jews. On the contrary, ordinary people felt sorry for them, and if reports by the Nazis, who were disappointed by the boycott, are to be believed, the amount of commerce done afterward by Jewish-owned business did not decline at all.
— Rudolph Herzog
When the past gets its teeth into our daily life, it may get to grips with an astringent reality and adjust our timeline. By recognizing ourselves in the light of our history, we become aware of what we are. ("Going back to yesterday")
— Erik Pevernagie
I guess love laughs at history a little.
— Sebastian Barry, Days Without End
In the future, Martin will recall this night as the first time -- and one of the only times -- he ever saw Germans crying in public, not at the news of a dead loved one or at the sight of their bombed home, and not in physical pain, but from spontaneous emotion. For this brief time, they were not hiding from one another, wearing their masks of cold and practical detachment. The music stirred the hardened sediment of their memory, chafed against layers of horror and shame, and offered a rare solace in their shared anger, grief and guilt.
— Jessica Shattuck, The Women in the Castle
History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.
— Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander the Great, and widely used in Mediterranean empires.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it an unforgettable thing, making it their own
— Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
If the stones that we walked on could talk, they would surely tell our story." - Magnetic Reverie
— Nico J. Genes
Misogyny was born of fear of women.
— Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity
Like, okay. Everyone in history thought they were the ones who finally knew everything. In their naissance, right, they were positive they knew exactly how the universe worked. Til the next set of guys came along and proved they were missing like a hundred important things. and then that set of guys were sure they had it all down, til another set came along and showed them parts they were missing." He glances at Julia, checking if she's laughing at him, which she isn't, and if she's listening, which she is, completely. "So." he says, "it's pretty unlikely, mathematically, that we are living in the one single era that has everything figured out. Which means there's a decent possibility that the reason we can't explain how ghosts and stuff could exist is because we haven't figured it out yet, not because they don't. And it is pretty arrogant of us to think it definitely has to be the other way around.
— Tana French, The Secret Place
This melodrama differed from others in that it was not written, it was to be played impromptu, and only once; after that it would be precedent, and would determine the destinies of mankind perhaps for centuries. Each of the actors hoped to write it his way, and no living man could say what the dénouement would be.
— Upton Sinclair, World's End
Once you get into this great stream of history, you can't get out.
— Richard Nixon
Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it
—  those who fail to learn history correctly – why they are simply doomed.
People who mock incidents in history such as 9/11 or the Holocaust, referring to it all as a hoax or stirring up crazy conspiracy theories about it, should really stop and think about their words first, both because it shows flaws in logic and rationality to deny the obvious, and because to play pretend with incidents which killed innocent people, well, that's just like laughing in the face of tragedy. It's as if to say, "no, it's not horrible enough that these people were killed, oh no, we have to drag on these incidents by indulging in melodramatic fantasies!" In essence this means that those who lost loved ones not only have to live with these losses forever, they also have to live with the people who deny that any of it ever happened. It does no good to forget history or to deny it. All it does is desensitize people; it tells them that it's all just a game, which then risks the possibility of nobody taking it seriously enough to prevent something similar from happening again.
— Rebecca McNutt
[T]he greater the sense of awe with which a text was regarded, the more complete might be the amnesia as to the original circumstances of its composition.
— Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
You look at the history of any sentient species and what do you find but tableaux of violence and slaughter. It’s finger-painted on the ceilings of caves and engraved into the walls of temples.
— James Luceno, Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel
The crisis of history in France, is a crisis of social bond, a crisis of citizenship. A citizen is the heir of a past more or less mythified, but he makes his own, whatever his personal genealogy. Today, under the pretext that the country has undergone considerable changes, some would like to transform the past in order to adopt it to the new face of France. Nothing, however, will make the past anything other than what it was. To pretend to change history is a totalitarian project: One who has control of the past has control over the future, one who has control over the present has control over the past, as George Orwell wrote in 1984.
— Jean Sevillia, Historiquement incorrect
The first gang members who joined the military were known as the Hounds, a group of former New York gang members.
— Carter F. Smith, Gangs and the Military: Gangsters, Bikers, and Terrorists with Military Training
History is indeed stranger than fiction. The twists and turns of human history are too outlandish for to be believable in any work of fiction.
— A.E. Samaan
In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could think of no other way to reprieve humanity from punishment for its sins (in particular, for the sin of being descended from a couple who had disobeyed him) than to allow an innocent man (his son no less) to be impaled through the limbs and slowly suffocate in agony. By acknowledging that this sadistic murder was a gift of divine mercy, people could earn eternal life. And if they failed to see the logic in all this, their flesh would be seared by fire for all eternity.
— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
South African history did not start in 1652.
— Nick    Wood, Azanian Bridges
When did the very first case of racism even occur? When did such blind hatred devour the souls of men and make them turn on their own brothers and sisters? What ever taught them that it was normal to be such monsters?
— Rebecca McNutt, Listen is Silent, or The Usurer
Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.
— Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking
I will lay it out in black and white, and my tale will contain more truth than the great dead histories on my father's bookshelves. For they say what happened, but not what it was like. They say what happened, but they do not say why.
— Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister
Thank you, sir. But, uh, can you tell me where the First New York Regiment is?
— Allan Zullo, Teens at War
My mother’s father, Grandfather Thieme, the son of a railroad engineer, looked quite dapper as a young man. Prior to 1933 the Hamburg Police Department consisted of 21 units, with 2,100 men. My grandfather was a Polizist with the Sicherheitspolizei or uniformed policeman with the department. Later, with an expansion of the Hamburg Police Department to 5,500 men and the formation of an investigative branch, he was promoted to the esteemed position of a Kriminalbeamte inspector. He rose to the rank of Chief of Detectives, and had a reputation of being tough, and not someone you could mess with. Having a baldhead and the general appearance of Telly Savalas, the late Hollywood movie actor, I don’t think anyone did. An action story and part of my grandfather’s legacy was when he chased a felon across the rooftops of prewar Hamburg, firing his Dienstpistole, service revolver, as he made his way from one steep inclined slate roof to the next.Of course, Grandpa got his man! Even with this factual tidbit, there isn’t all that much I know about him, other than that, at the then ripe old age of sixty-four, he peacefully died in his chair while reading the evening newspaper.
— Captain Hank Bracker, "Suppresed I Rise"
Interesting, I thought, how quickly history becomes stories rather than reality; one step already from the truth.
— Sarah Dunant, Snowstorms in a Hot Climate
The original KDF-wagen as it was called was basic and rudimentary, but essentially the same as the later post war production cars that followed. Features of this vehicle included cable operated brakes (!!) and a tiny 800cc flat four motor with a single exhaust, 16 inch tires and the KDF twin glove compartment (without lids) dash.Oh, and last but not least – probably the most famous and sought-after rear window in automotive history!
— Christina Engela, Bugspray
Indeed, if these final decades of the millennium have taught us anything, it must be that oral tradition never was the ‘other’ we accused it of being; it never was the primitive, preliminary technology of communication we thought it had to be. Rather, if the whole truth is told, oral tradition stands out as the single most dominant communicative technology of our species, as both a historical fact and, in many areas still, a contemporary reality. The miracle of the flat inscribable surface and Gutenberg’s genius aside, even the electronic revolution cannot challenge the long-term preeminence of the oral tradition. ("Introduction" by John Foley)
— E. Anne Mackay, Mnemosyne, Supplements, Signs of Orality: The Oral Tradition and Its Influence in the Greek and Roman World
A constant factor in human history is the need to protect oneself. Another factor is the urge to attack someone else.
— Stan Beckensall, Coastal Castles of Northumberland
These last months, I have learned that the acknowledged history that belongs to the daylight, that is not the only history. Turn over the stone and you will find another history, wriggling to escape.
— Beth Underdown, The Witchfinder's Sister
I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can be kept up only by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout it’s whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feelings, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered.Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves - but there is no ageing “Mankind.” Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in the deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture “advances”, this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite, … this ability of a soul to fill its world with shapes, traits and symbols - like and consistent amongst themselves - belongs most definitely not to the world-age of the primitives but exclusively to the springtimes of great Cultures. Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality. It is the first formative act of that spirituality. Nowhere else is it to be found. There - it must be.
— Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
The mistakes of history bring relentless reprisals.
— Pearl S. Buck, Living Reed: A Novel of Korea
Cut off's are like real sadist as they watch some folks happy and disappoint the majority. People dream of a life at Delhi University. Delhiites know there is something special about the brand name and life at the campus. Rest as they say is history and it speaks volumes.
— Parul Wadhwa, The Masquerade
God is gathering a small number of chosen people who will live at the edge of one time shifting to another time. These are the people who will make history
— Sunday Adelaja
More history than ever is today being revised or invented by people who do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose. Today is the great age of historical mythology. The defence of history by its professionals is today more urgent in politics than ever. We are needed.
— Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-century Life
History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.
— A.J.P. Taylor
My ancestors were conquerors, though now they are heroes in our history." Glancing at Amos, he said, "But we wrote the history.
— Raymond E. Feist, The King's Buccaneer
All history is modern history.
— Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose
Media is so influenceable, yet so influent. Whoever controls the media controls the society, and its opinion.
— Philip Dunham
It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.
— Will Durant
And immediately we rushed like horses, wild with the knowledge of this song, and bolted into a startingly loud harmony: 'Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves; Britons, never-never-ne-verr shall be slaves!'and singing, I saw the kings and the queens in the room with us, laughing in a funny way, and smiling and happy with us. The headmaster was soaked in glee. And I imagined all the glories of Britannia, who, or what or which, had brought us out of the ships crossing over from the terrible seas from Africa, and had placed us on this island, and had given us such good headmasters and assistant masters, and such a nice vicar to teach us how to pray to God - and he had come from England; and such nice white people who lived on the island with us, and who gave us jobs watering their gardens and taking out their garbage, most of which we found delicious enough to eat...all through the ages, all through the years of history; from the Tudors on the wall, down through the Stuarts also on the wall, all through the Elizabethans and including those men and women singing in their hearts with us, hanging dead and distant on our schoolroom walls; Britannia, who, or what or which, had ruled the waves all these hundreds of years, all these thousands and millions of years, and kept us on the island, happy - the island of Barbados (Britannia the Second), free from all invasions. Not even the mighty Germans; not even the Russians whom our headmaster said were dressed in red, had dared to come within submarine distance of our island! Britannia who saw to it that all Britons (we on the island were, beyond doubt, little black Britons, just like the white big Britons up in Britannialand. The headmaster told us so!) - never-never-ne-verr, shall be slaves!
— Austin Clarke, Amongst Thistles and Thorns
All his life he has been in the shadow of Grandfather, and of the man for whom he was named."..."Then, Grandfather would tell us it has nothing to do with fame.”“He enjoyed the notoriety, though,” said Dash.“Agreed,” said Jimmy. “But he gained it from being so bloody brilliant at what he did. He didn’t set out to be the most fiendishly clever noble in history.”“Maybe that’s what Father knew from the start; it’s just getting the job done and let history decide what history will decide,” observed Dash.
— Raymond E. Feist, Shards of a Broken Crown
For the greatest part the American bombardiers, using the Norden bombsight with its autopilot, hit their target. However on nights with poor visibility anything was possible.As the bombs fell, people pushed their way down the path towards the square concrete entrance to the bunker. In their frantic haste to get to safety they knocked each other down. Stepping onto each other, many people, especially the older ones, fell as they tried to get out of harm’s way, and were crushed. The pushing and shoving was relentless as the poor screaming people were trampled in the dark. My best friend Anna tried to bring some clothing with her. She was among those trampled and died when the sharp end of a coat hanger pierced her throat. The horror of it all brought the worst out in people, who behaved worse than animals. It wasn’t until the air raid was over that the wardens undertook the grim task of removing the bodies of these unfortunate victims.Photo Caption: The actual bunker in Mannheim, Germany.
— Hank Bracker, Suppressed I Rise
Many of the slaves believe such stories, and think it is not worth while to exchange slavery for such a hard kind of freedom. It is difficult to persuade such that freedom could make them useful men, and enable them to protect their wives and children. If those heathen in our Christian land had as much teaching as some Hindoos, they would think otherwise. They would know that liberty is more valuable than life. They would begin to understand their own capabilities, and exert themselves to become men and women.
— Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
History is written by victors,” said Duko. “But I have little use for history. It is the future with which I am concerned.
— Raymond E. Feist, Shards of a Broken Crown
They say that history is going on somewhere.They say it won't stop. I have heldOne picture still for a long time and waited.
— William Stafford
. . . what is thought now, and held to be universal truth, was not thought then, or true of that time.
— George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here: A Harrowing Tale of World War II
... once you start demonizing groups of people, when you make them the other, you can justify doing just about anything you want to the, can't you? Look at history if you don't believe me.
— Brunonia Barry, The Fifth Petal
Our children are an integral component of our stories as we are of theirs and, therefore, each child acts as the knighted messengers to carry their forebears’ stories into the future. To deprive our children of the narrative cells regarding the formation of the ozone layer that rims the atmosphere of our ancestors’ saga and parental determination of selfhood is to deny them of the sacred right to claim the sanctity of their heritage. Accordingly, all wrinkled brow natives are chargeable with the sacrosanct obligation of telling their kith and kin the memorable story of the scenic days they spent as children of nature splashing about in their naked innocence in the brook of infinite time and space. We must scrupulous document our family’s history as well as scrawl out our personal story.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Somewhere beyond Tibet, among the icy peaks and secluded valleys of Central Asia, there lies an inaccessible paradise, a place of universal wisdom and ineffable peace called Shambhala . . . It is inhabited by adepts from every race and culture who form an inner circle of humanity secretly guiding its evolution.In that place, so the legends say, sages have existed since the beginning of human history in a valley of supreme beatitude that is sheltered from the icy arctic winds and where the climate is always warm and temperate, the sun always shines, the gentle airs are always beneficent and nature flowers luxuriantly.
— Victoria Le Page
We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable.
— William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
The world will never know you because you did not cross the limits of yourself
— Sunday Adelaja
But if the history of mankind was her own history, in a way she was thousands of years old.
— Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World
Pretty soon, I'll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that's left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do.
— Svetlana Alexievich, Czasy secondhand. Koniec czerwonego człowieka
She'd always talk about how great Gandhi was. I'd tell her the only reason Gandhi survived after his first protest was that he was dealing with the Brits. If Stalin had been running India, he'd of been dead in a second, his name forgotten.
— William R. Forstchen, One Second After
Closing a museum to save money is like holding your breath to save oxygen...
— Nanette L. Avery
The moment of a fall from greatness often comes just when a people and a nation feel most secure. The cry "the barbarians are at the gates" too often comes as a terrifying bolt out of the blue, which is often the last cry ever heard.
— William R. Forstchen, One Second After
In the seventh century the Arabs created a new world into which other peoples were drawn. In the nineteenth and twentieth, they were themselves drawn into a new world created in western Europe.
— Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples
What I wanted was for them to have a grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.
— Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
The death camps seem easier to comprehend if we put them all into the basket of one vast generalization, which the term "death camps" implies, but in the process we mythologize or trivialize them.
— Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
In class I was out of place because I could so easily be distracted from concepts by metaphors and facts. Clearly, I was less intelligent than I had hoped, and I felt frustrated by an inarticulate notion that something was wrong if old material was processed as if the immediate past and the uncertain future had no bearing on it.
— Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
How historians explain time is one thing, but how we live time is quite another.
— André Aciman
No empire lasts forever, no dynasty continues unbroken. Some day, you and I will be mere legends. All that matters is whether we did what we could with the life that was given to us.
— Krishna Udayasankar, Three
You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance—even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.
— Louis Menand
Be bold in life. Seize the moment. There is no surrender, no retreat. There is only conquer or be conquered, victory or defeat. Anything less is to be forgotten to history.
— Jeffrey Fry
Mayor Walmsley is using the typical Jim Crow manipulation tactics to deflect the blame and guilt. He's a classic racist politician with an ulterior motive,” says Ora.
— Shaune Bordere, Action Words: Journey of a Journalist
The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen captured of the corpses and the living skeletons at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald seemed to convey the worst crimes of Hitler...this was far from the truth. The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar.
— Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.
— Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
To some extent the history of plagiarism is a history of notebooks.
— Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words
There is no denying it, our past stinks and seeps into our present. Occasionally I get such a potent whiff of history that my mind spins and my stomach lurches.
— Jinat Rehana Begum, First Fires
No incident, however seemingly trivial, is unimportant in the scheme of things. One event leads to another, which triggers something else and before you know where you are, the ramifications spread far and wide throughout history, echoing down the ages; getting fainter and fainter but never completely dying away. They talk of the harmony of the spheres, but history is a symphony of echoes, every little action has huge consequences. They're not always apparent and sometimes, in our game, sometimes effect comes before cause, not after. It makes your head ache.
— Jodi Taylor, A Symphony of Echoes
The History of computers is amazing... people which tell the story are looking like they are having fun.
— Deyth Banger
Freedom is difficult…but we have never had to put a wall up to keep the people in.
— Bill Clintion
Old, is it?" the man asks."Yes, very.""Pre-war, is it?""Yes," I say. "If by war you mean the Norman invasion.
— Garrett Carr, The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland's Border
God decided that this time in history was perfect for you to glorify Him and make an eternal difference. So God gave you unique gifts, talents, passions, and experiences to propel you into your life purpose.
— Craig Groeschel, Weird: Because Normal Isn't Working
The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness. This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In the situation of the radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world— the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history, has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.
— Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future
The most striking difference between the ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. In other words, one destroyed the dignity of human thought whereas the others destroy the dignity of human action. The old manipulators of logic were the concern of the philosopher, whereas the modern manipulators of facts stand in the way of the historian. For history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility—based upon the fact that it is enacted by men and therefore can be understood by men—is in danger, whenever facts are no longer held to be part and parcel of the past and present world, and are misused to prove this or that opinion.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.
— Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years
History judges a leader by results. Let my results do the talking.
— General (Retd) Pervez Musharraf
History is disappointed with us human being.
— Davan Yahya Khalil
In addition to the American officers, walking around the bustling camp were French and British officers who lectured the wide-eyed teenagers about the conditions in the trenches on the Western Front. The foreign officers told stories of the terrible battles of Ypres, the Somme, and Verdun. Roy listened with awe and foreboding to the danger from unseen enemies firing shell after shell, the muddy lines of trenches, the heroic acts of men disregarding their own safety to rescue wounded comrades.
— Paul T. Dean, Courage: Roy Blanchard's Journey in America's Forgotten War
Margrethe Mather, a photographer from Los Angeles, came to his studio in Glendale, California called Tropico, where Weston asked her to be his studio assistant. It didn’t take long before the two developed a passionate, lustful, relationship. Both Weston and Mather became active in the growing bohemian cultural scene in the greater Los Angeles area. She was extremely outgoing and artistic in a most flamboyant way. Her bohemian sexual values were new to Weston’s conventional thinking, but Mather excited him and presented him with a new outlook that he found enticing. Mather was beautiful, and being bisexual and having been a high-class prostitute, was delightfully worldly. Mather's uninhibited lifestyle became irresistible to Weston and her photography took him into a new and exciting art form. As Mather worked and overtly played with him, she presented a lifestyle that was in stark contrast to Weston’s conventional home life, and he soon came to see his wife Flora as a person with whom he had little in common.
— Hank Bracker
It is only when people don’t know history well that they judge the present so blindly in ignorance!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
I'm a student of 'istory, which is a bit of the same thing. We learn it so we don't repeat it. Ye've seen things now that no one would believe, and ye'll 'ave to live with the knowledge. There's good in what ye've learned, but there's danger in it, too. It'll be the mark of yer character 'ow ye choose to use what ye know.
— April White, Cheating Death
We have no one to go to for help. Not even a church. Anything goes, now that our President Roosevelt signed the order to get rid of us. How can he do this to his own citizens? No lawyer has the courage to defend us. Caucasian friends stay away for fear of being labeled "Jap lovers." There's not a more lonely feeling than to be banished by my own country. There's no place to go.
— Kiyo Sato, Kiyo's Story: A Japanese-American Family's Quest for the American Dream