c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
You might find it alarming to think that your doctor will not actually need to see you in person but might make a diagnosis based on the position of the stars, the colour and smell of your urine, and the taste of your blood.
— Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
Ainsi dans le faste ostenstatoire d'une dernière cérémonie, le bourgeois, laissant à ses fils un héritage plus riche que celui qu'il a reçu de son père, quite ce monde où il a conu au moins deux grands sources de joie, la fortune et la vanité...Thus in the ostentatious pomp of a last ceremony, the bourgeois, leaving his sons a richer heritage than he has received from his own father, departs from this world where he has known at least two great sources of joy, the fortune and the vanity...
— Georges Mongrédien, La Vie Quotidienne sous Louis XIV
Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.
— Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?
That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.
— David Benioff, City of Thieves
One should never underestimate the role of stupidity in history
— Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran
A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe.
— Henry Kissinger
A historian can never claim to have the last word on anything as he is limited by his sources and further so by his viewpoint.
— Ambeth R. Ocampo, Meaning and History: The Rizal Lectures
Perhaps that is the greatest crime of conquest--that a civilization is denied the right to evolve beyond its own embarrassment.
— Neal Shusterman, Downsiders
And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.
— Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Life and study have persuaded me of the openness of history. There is no inevitability in history. Thinking about what might have happened, what could have happened, is a necessary element in trying to understand what did happen. And if, as I believe, individual acts of decency and courage make a difference, then they need to be recorded and remembered.
— Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known
In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and he was about to hang himself.
— Heinrich von Kleist, Kleist: Selected Writings
(regarding Charles Lee) This eccentric and notably slovenly man was always trailed by his beloved dogs. "When I can be convinced that men are as worthy objects as dogs", he once explained, "I shall transfer my benevolence to them.
— Ron Chernow
A historian tries to understand what happened, why it happened, what was the context, who did what, and what assumptions led them to act as they did. A historian customarily displays a certain diffidence about trying to influence events, knowing that unanticipated developments often lead to unintended consequences.
— Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.
— Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
The prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been censured and ridiculed by critics, who aspire to the character of superior wisdom: but if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste is an incontestible proof of the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper of the present times. Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labors!
— Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent
By journey's end the brides were much better acquainted with their grooms and more or less pleased with the matches. Sybil Bingham wrote in her diary, thanking God for answering her prayer for filling "the void" with a husband like Hiram, a "treasure rich and undeserved." Having read his insufferable memoir, "A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands", all I can say is: I'm happy for her?
— Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes
Because the human history is the history of shoes. The history of places where we ever tread and stand.
— Stebby Julionatan
This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.
— Nick Joaquín, Culture and History
Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the present, or at least better organized in the mind.
— Gregory Maguire, A Lion Among Men
Tesla,” the vicar mused. “That’s a foreign name, is it not? Hungarian,is it?”“Serbian,” I corrected him. “I’m afraid the ——shire Teslas are ascant three centuries in these parts, having constructed Tesla Hall inthe reign of Queen Elizabeth.We are a restless people, and no doubtwill be moving on again any century now.
— Vinnie Tesla, The Erotofluidic Age
In the end the war was Hitler's war. It was not perhaps the war he wanted. But it was the war he was prepared to risk if he had to. Nothing could deter him...He was no longer prepared to wait on events. He needed to force them to manipulate them to manufacture incidents to create pretexts for action.
— Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came
In political affairs illusions are usually the product of a failure to appreciate change; but such failure-usually a necessary and perhaps salutary part of human affairs-becomes, when the change is very fast, not a stabilizing conservatism but a form of deception resembling lunacy.
— Laurence Lafore, The End Of Glory: An Interpretation Of The Origins Of World War Ii
It is better to give your path to a dog than to be bitten by him, contesting for the right.
— C.W. Abe Lincoln
History is lived through and, for the fortunate, survived by people.
— Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came
We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.
— Margaret MacMillan
There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency.
— Louis Menand
Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture.
— Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
History doesn't choose individual people. History chooses everyone. Every day. The only question is: How long will you ignore the call?
— Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle
You will be most readily cured of vanity or presumption by studying the history of music, and by hearing the master pieces which have been produced at different periods.
— Robert Schumann
He who would confine his thought to present time will not understand present reality.
— Jules Michelet
Right now, we are in a peak cycle. There’s tremendous energy out there, directed against the state. It’s not all focused, but it’s there, and it’s building. Maybe this will be sufficient to accomplish what we must accomplish over the fairly short run. We’ll see, and we can certainly hope that this is the case. But perhaps not. We must be prepared to wage a long struggle. If this is the case then we’ll probably see a different cycle, one in which the revolutionary energy of the people seems to have dispersed, run out of steam. But – and this is important- such cycles are deceptive. Things appear to be at low ebb, but actually what’s happening is a period of regroupment, a period in which we step back and learn from the mistakes made during the preceding cycle.
— George L. Jackson
We perceive, as from a great distance, a thousand years filled with dim shapes of men moving blindly, performing strangely, in an unreal shadowy world.
— Carl Lotus Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers
The prosecutor uttered the party line that would distinguish revue from burlesque for the next thirty years. "The difference is movement. On Broadway, unadorned female figures are used to artistic advantage in tableaux. They do not move.
— Dita Von Teese, Burlesque and the Art of the Teese / Fetish and the Art of the Teese
American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of our 100,000 generations. We have done it all sleepwalking. Nature let a few apes into the lab of evolution, switched on the lights, and left us there to mess about with an ever-growing supply of ingredients and processes. The effect on us and the world has accumulated ever since. Let’s list a few steps between the earliest times and this: sharp stones, animal skins, useful bits of bone and wood, wild fire, tame fire, seeds for eating, seeds for planting, houses, villages, pottery, cities, metals, wheels, explosives. What strikes one most forcefully is the acceleration, the runaway progression of change - or to put it another way, the collapsing of time. From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years; from the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.
— Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
Yong is the outer manifestation of something. Ti is the underlying essence. Technology is a yong associated with a particular ti that is ... Western, and completely alien to us [the Chinese]. For centuries, since the time of the Opium Wars, we have struggled to absorb the yong of technology without importing the Western ti. But it has been impossible. Just as our ancestors could not open our ports to the West without accepting the poison of opium, we could not open our lives to Western technology without taking in the Western ideas, which have been as a plague on our society. The result has been centuries of chaos.
— Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20—25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.
— Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
The drinking dens are spilling outThere's staggering in the squareThere's lads and lasses falling aboutAnd a crackling in the airDown around the dungeon doorsThe shelters and the queuesEverybody's looking forSomebody's arms to fall intoAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowThere's frost on the graves and the monumentsBut the taverns are warm in townPeople curse the governmentAnd shovel hot food downThe lights are out in the city hallThe castle and the keepThe moon shines down upon it allThe legless and asleepAnd it's cold on the tollgateWith the wagons creeping throughCold on the tollgateGod knows what I could do with youAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowThe garrison sleeps in the citadelWith the ghosts and the ancient stonesHigh up on the parapetA Scottish piper stands aloneAnd high on the windThe highland drums begin to rollAnd something from the past just comesAnd stares into my soulAnd it's cold on the tollgateWith the Caledonian BluesCold on the tollgateGod knows what I could do with youAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowWhat it isIt's what it is nowThere's a chink of light, there's a burning wickThere's a lantern in the towerWee Willie Winkie with a candlestickStill writing songs in the wee wee hoursOn Charlotte Street I takeA walking stick from my hotelThe ghost of Dirty DickIs still in search of Little NellAnd it's what it isIt's what it is nowOh what it isWhat it is now
— Mark Knopfler, Sailing to Philadelphia
Devise some creed, and live it, beyond theirs,Or I shall think you but their spendthrift heirs.
— Edmund Blunden
...history is a selection process - it chooses moments and events, and even people - it hands them a situation that they shouldn't be able to overcome, and it's in those moments, in that fight, that people find out who they are.
— Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle
He tans into burning while the opening fanfare to "Peaches en Regalia" flows over him, the bugle call for a hippie army that marched at the peak of the American parabola, that moment when physics held its breath to allow levitation, a small reward before the descent. The hippies knew it then, Maggot Boy Johnson thinks; they couldn't build it into words but they could feel it; a floating in the stomach as history shifted direction. They stopped, hey, what's that sound, and knew that the spiny skyscrapers reflected in the river, the chasms of concrete, the wide streets and sidewalks, the power lines cutting into the hills and mountains above missile silos, the highways drawing lines across the blank plains under enormous skies, the pupil of God's eye, would be the ruins that their grandchildren wandered among, the reminders that once there was always water in the faucet, there was electricity all the time, and America was prying off the shackles of its past. The vision opened up to them and winked out again, and those it blinded staggered through their lives unable to see anything else, while the rest of them wondered if they had only dreamed it.
— Brian Francis Slattery, Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America
I cannot say much for this Monarch's Sense--Nor would I if I could, for he was a Lancastrian. I suppose you know all about the Wars between him and the Duke of York who was on the right side; if you do not, you had better read some other History, for I shall not be very difuse in this, meaning by it only to vent my spleen against, and show my Hatred to all those people whose parties or principles do not suit with mine, and not to give information.
— Jane Austen
Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How about—the Saffron Shift.If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or living forest floor.Assigning hues to time periods, the sum total of history is saffron-brown—but the chromatic arc starts from blinding white (prehistory) to sun-yellow (Ancient Greece), then deepening to pale wood tones (Dark Ages) and finally exploding like an infinite chord into a full brown palette that includes mahoganies, siennas (Middle Ages), oak, sandalwood (the Renaissance), cherry, maple (Age of Reason), and near-black old woods (Industrial Revolution) for which there may not be names.As time approaches our own, the wood-brown palette fades to a weird glassy colorlessness, goes black-and-white for a brief span as you think of photographs of your grandparents, and then again fades until we get a clear medium that is the color of the world.And the present moment is perfectly transparent.It's only as you start looking into the future, that the colors start returning. The glass is turning silvery with a murky haze, and there is blue somewhere in the distance . . .
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
History isn't written by the winners - it's written by everyone - it's a jigsaw of facts from contradictory sources. But every once in a while, you unearth that one original document that no one can argue with...
— Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle
They need only to look at him, hear his name, and the last of reason goes up in smoke. They sink into a state of befuddlement.
— Anna von der Goltz
Revolutionaries - true revolutionaries - are aggressive, ruthless, and generally seize the main chance, as William Henry Drayton did when he saw that stump-speaking was getting him nowhere. But defenders of the status quo tend toward caution and legalisms and inaction until it is too late
— John Buchanan, The Road to Guilford Courthouse: The American Revolution in the Carolinas
Sing, boy! sing! The ages are waiting for you. Sing! sing! All the world will hear you. God knows what will come of it.
— Charles Carleton Coffin, The Story of Liberty
[Alon Johnson] Later wrote that, "coming through a battered building near a well known and dangerous doorway. I heard something unfamiliar -- the sound of excited voices somewhere in the distance. The significance of this babble seemed to escape the tired company, but to me it suggested a sudden and radical change in the situation. Important enough to risk being shot at by showing myself in the doorway. Nothing happened, so I stepped into the street,...
— Mark Zuehlke, Ortona: Canada's Epic World War II Battle
History is simply what's behind us.
— Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle
We were meant to survive because of our minds' ability to reason, our ability to live with frustration in order to maintain our virtue. We wore smiling masks while dying inside.
— Anchee Min
I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever visited; and it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are available in America.
— Hinton Helper
Emancipation was a proclamation, but not a fact.
— Lyndon B. Johnson
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.
— Theodor W. Adorno
After 1656 the Dutch, who had gained control over the Moluccas, chose the islands that could be most easily defended. They then burned all the nutmeg trees on the other islands to make sure no one else could profit from the trees. Anyone caught trying to smuggle nutmeg out of the Moluccas was put to death. The Dutch also dipped all their nutmegs in lime (a caustic substance) to stop the seed from sprouting and to prevent people from planting their own trees. Pigeons, however, defied these Dutch precautions. Birds could eat nutmeg fruits, fly to another island and leave the seeds behind in their droppings.
— Meredith Sayles Hughes, Flavor Foods: Spices & Herbs
His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.
— Patrick White, Voss
A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.
— Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
Burr had the dark and severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the forehead and dark brown, almost black, eyes that suggested a cross between an eagle and a raven. Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair, all of which came together to suggest an animated beam of light to Burr’s somewhat stationary shadow.
— Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
If writers only dared to dare, a Suetonius or a Tacitus of the Novel could exist, for the Novel is essentially the history of manners, turned into a story and a play, as is History itself often enough. And there is no other difference than this: that the one, the Novel, cloaks its manners under the disguise of invented characters, while the other, History, provides names and addresses. Only, the Novel probes much deeper than history. It has an ideal, and History has none; it is limited by reality. The Novel also holds the stage much longer. ("A Woman's Vengeance")
— Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques
No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responibilty for a nation's collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference, as basic in motivation as it was elevated in rhetoric. The momentum behind Zaire's free-fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad.
— Michala Wrong, In the footsteps of Mr Kurtz
The early settlers amazed her--they had pluck, they led lives of sweaty drama. Theirs was a world of corsets and whipping posts and indentured servitude. People worked the land and died in ungainly ways. Modern life, in comparison, seemed a cinch.
— Jennifer Vanderbes, Strangers at the Feast
The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes--to me a beatitude--is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women--or men--can suffer is to be bereft of their past.
— Shirley Abbott, Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South
Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries were determined by the scant information provided by a handful of surviving documents, seemed the greater disservice. I paid homage with my imagination, and hoped I might get visitors to do the same.
— Leah Hager Cohen, House Lights
A ruling government can't afford to publish history in a version which lessens its' chance for reelection.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but ‘progress’ — the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events.
— Osip Mandelstam
Wilier races had interbred with human race during immemorial.Therefore no need to look for them on anywhere but in ourselves.
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
When William Johnson and slave walked down that long, winding American road toward freedom and justice, they didn't realize they would be speaking out for all those left behind. They learned that it would take hard work to make the words of the Declaration of Independence mean what they said. Ellen and William Craft were willing to do their part.
— Joy Hakim, A History of Us: Book 4: The New Nation
Human history is full of great men, great women, individuals, with the will for power - all of them with governesses like her.
— Daniel Nayeri
The psychosphere, the logosphere, is permeated by concepts, ideas, verbalizations, a whole apparatus devised, or rather evolved, to form some sort of mental contact with reality--or to block it off. That is, a large circle of the "thinking," "educated" class take ideas as more veridical than facts.
— Robert Conquest
Anything the Austrians could do, the Prussians could do better.
— Timothy C.W. Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815
The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma
— Henry James, Daisy Miller
Now if a man thus favoured died as he has lived, he will be just the one you are looking for: the only sort of person who deserves to be called happy. But mark this: until he is dead, keep the word "happy" in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky...
— Herodotus
Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.
— Francis Parkman
The historian, predisposed to verbal evidence, who reads about rather than looks at objects, becomes dependent upon secondhand impressions and is helpless when critics disagree or interpose their own extraneous judgments between the work and the viewer.
— Oscar Handlin, Truth in History
It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).
— Lauro Martines, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for Renaissance Florence
The Noblest form of Affection
— Oscar Wilde
In inventing [General Juan Manuel de] Rosas’ self-justification, I have taken the liberty of drawing almost exclusively on the words of Tony Blair, and the various self-justifications he produced to defend his foreign policy adventures with George Bush in the Middle East and the Central Asia.
— Harry Thompson
After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose of the meaning of life. In 1850 [ten years before he was elected President], Lincoln told Herdon [his law partner] "How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived.
— Ronald C. White Jr.
Certainly it's a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don't seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect.""I don't deny that they were imperfect," Julian said in a distant voice. "I'm not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them.""What sin is that?""They evolved into us," he said.
— Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
Have you noticed how just trying to impose any sort of chronology on events makes it seem as though a lot of time has been occupied?
— James Hamilton-Paterson, Cooking with Fernet Branca
Look son, the Human Pig.(shocked)Mother, y-you're inhuman!(deadpan)Another animal could do this?
— Larry Gonick, Cartoon History of the Universe II, Vol. 8-13: From the Springtime of China to the Fall of Rome
In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values. . . .History with a capital H is being called in to fill the void. It restores a sense not necessarily of a divine being but of something above and beyond human beings. It is our authority: it can vindicate us and judge us, and damn those who oppose us.
— Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History
One of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.
— John Carey
marinate your mind
— David McCullough
History, as it was purveyed to us, was not so much a narrative, not even the detached observation of the rise and fall of fortunes and cultures. It was the litany of loss, attended by the inevitable sympathy for the vanquished side. The past was always the underdog, and we sensed it was only right to be on its side against the bully future. We were left with the impression that our own grip was loosening on some essential pediment as one empire after another was swallowed up, and the centuries collapsed into our own.
— Patricia Hampl, Virgin Time
It was considered at the time a striking proof of virtue in the young king that he was sorry for his father's death;but, as common subjects have that virtue too, sometimes, we will say no more about it.
— Charles Dickens
Thus, Christ making His human divine and taking it into heaven is the central event of all time. It is the miracle of all miracles. The resurrection bursts like a sun on the timeline of history, which means this innermost event shines light on all points in history leading up to it and after it.
— Steve Sanchez, Rethinking Redemption
...I believe that nothing that once was can be completely undone. Even if destroyed in the material world and forgotten by men, it remains and will remain alive in the memory of an infinite being for which the past as well as the future is always present, and that is thus the greatest, the only true historian, and the keeper of the eternal tradition of which even our best human traditions ...are but shadows and images.
— Paul Oskar Kristeller
It is a dangerous thing to have the same men in both the prophecy and the history business.
— Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692
Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn’t want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape — and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.
— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Here. Here I am.You've taken everything from us, but not who we are! We still exist! One day grass will grow here and overgrow the ruins. Or day this will be forgotten. But you... No one will ever forget you! The shame of humanity.
— Bruno Apitz, Nackt unter Wölfen
History honors the unique minority the majority cannot forget.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
From the start the proportion of asocials in the camp was about one-third of the total population, and throughout the first years prostitutes, homeless and ‘work-shy’ women continued to pour in through the gates. Overcrowding in the asocial blocks increased fast, order collapsed, and then followed squalor and disease. Although we learn a lot about what the political prisoners thought of the asocials, we learn nothing of what the asocials thought of them. Unlike the political women, they left no memoirs. Speaking out after the war would mean revealing the reason for imprisonment in the first place, and incurring more shame. Had compensation been available they might have seen a reason to come forward, but none was offered. The German associations set up after the war to help camp survivors were dominated by political prisoners. And whether they were based in the communist East or in the West, these bodies saw no reason to help ‘asocial’ survivors. Such prisoners had not been arrested as ‘fighters’ against the fascists, so whatever their suffering none of them qualified for financial or any other kind of help. Nor were the Western Allies interested in their fate. Although thousands of asocials died at Ravensbrück, not a single black- or green-triangle survivor was called upon to give evidence for the Hamburg War Crimes trials, or at any later trials. As a result these women simply disappeared: the red-light districts they came from had been flattened by Allied bombs, so nobody knew where they went. For many decades, Holocaust researchers also considered the asocials’ stories irrelevant; they barely rate mention in camp histories. Finding survivors amongst this group was doubly hard because they formed no associations, nor veterans’ groups. Today, door-knocking down the Düsseldorf Bahndamm, one of the few pre-war red-light districts not destroyed, brings only angry shouts of ‘Get off my patch'.
— Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women
What was it like to live amidst such machines, to be familiar with them, to have them shape one's earliest intuitions about machinery: how it works, what it does, how it compares to living creatures?
— Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument Over What Makes Living Things Tick
History in the storyteller's hand was a potent force indeed,....
— Kate Morton, The Distant Hours
...history is inherently an eclectic discipline and the skills it requires are correspondingly diverse. And therein lie its strengths. Eclecticism is sometimes treated as a dirty word. At the very least it sounds untidy - just so: if historians treat the past in too tidy a manner they lose a great deal...It is precisely the ability to embrace complexities while making sense of them, and to think flexibly about diverse phenomena at distinct analytical levels, that characterises historians' purchase on the past.
— Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice
Many of the people I write about were deliberately left out of the history books that we were forced to read in school. For me, that history was "written wrong" and needed to be corrected. My intention was to make them visible so they could be role models for others. To show how each, in his or her own way, dribbled gracefully around that obstacle in the narrow corridor.
— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, On the Shoulders of Giants: My Journey Through the Harlem Renaissance
Achievement was worth of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself
— Tom Holland
Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state. However great a citizen might become, however great he might wish to become, the truest greatness of all still belonged to the Roman Republic itself
— Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic
How many rapes occurred inside the walls of the main camp of Ravensbrück is hard to put a figure to: so many of the victims—already, as Ilse Heinrich said, half dead—did not survive long enough after the war to talk about it. While many older Soviet women were reluctant to talk of the rape, younger survivors feel less restraint today. Nadia Vasilyeva was one of the Red Army nurses who were cornered by the Germans on the cliffs of the Crimea. Three years later in Neustrelitz, northwest of Ravensbrück, she and scores of other Red Army women were cornered again, this time by their own Soviet liberators intent on mass rape. Other women make no excuses for the Soviet rapists. ‘They were demanding payment for liberation,’ said Ilena Barsukova. ‘The Germans never raped the prisoners because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers raped us. We were disgusted that they behaved like this. Stalin had said that no soldiers should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt.’Like the Russians, Polish survivors were also reluctant for many years to talk of Red Army rape. ‘We were terrified by our Russian liberators,’ said Krystyna Zając. ‘But we could not talk about it later because of the communists who had by then taken over in Poland.’ Nevertheless, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs and French survivors all left accounts of being raped as soon as they reached the Soviet lines. They talked of being ‘hunted down’, ‘captured’ or ‘cornered’ and then raped.In her memoirs Wanda Wojtasik, one of the rabbits, says it was impossible to encounter a single Russian without being raped. As she, Krysia and their Lublin friends tried to head east towards their home, they were attacked at every turn. Sometimes the approach would begin with romantic overtures from ‘handsome men’, but these approaches soon degenerated into harassment and then rape. Wanda did not say she was raped herself, but describes episodes where soldiers pounced on friends, or attacked them in houses where they sheltered, or dragged women off behind trees, who then reappeared sobbing and screaming. ‘After a while we never accepted lifts and didn’t dare go near any villages, and when we slept someone always stood watch.
— Sarah Helm, Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women
Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris—Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds. London, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year at Tyburn, just north of Hyde Park. (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a good view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg for mercy, he wrote, was a crowd of "at least 12 or 14,000 people.") In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings. "The corpses dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes stand out against the sky, in so many old paintings, are merely a realistic detail," Braudel observed. "They were part of the landscape." Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V.A.C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At that time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortes estimated for the empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to Braudel.
— Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Even so, I think historians have more to offer than perspective on our present woes. The foreign country we call the past also lets us look beyond the horizons of what is, to see what could be.
— Rutger Bregman, Utopia for Realists: Why Making the World a Better Place Isn't a Fantasy and How We Can Do It
So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we can imagine.
— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
European emigrants and their descendants are all over the place, which requires explanation.
— Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900
History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.
— Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life
That was my story. Or at least the way I remember it. What happened to those characters and the places that had to do with those turbulent times, can be researched in libraries or the memories of the elderly. People like Beigbeder, Rosalinda, or Hillgarth went on to the history books.People like Marcus and me didn't. But that doesn't mean our lives were less important. Because, in the end, we all play a part in the world's fate. And Marcus and I always stood on the other side of the story.Actively invisible during that time we lived in between the seams.
— María Dueñas, The Time in Between
Readers will be swept up by the drama and fast pace of this powerful debut novel.
— Reading Today Online, International Reading Association
We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.
— James Anthony Froude
shot through the heart, and you're to blame! you give love, a bad name.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1949-2001 Presidential Executive Orders from Truman to Clinton and George W. Bush
If one looks at modern society, it is obvious that in order to live, the great majority of people are forced to sell their labour power. All the physical and intellectual capacities existing in human beings, in their personalities, which must be set in motion to produce useful things, can only be used if they are sold in exchange for wages. Labour power is usually perceived as a commodity bought and sold nearly like all others. The existence of exchange and wage-labour seems normal, inevitable. Yet the introduction of wage-labour involved conflict, resistance, and bloodshed. The separation of the worker from the means of production, now an accepted fact of life, took a long time and was accomplished by force.In England, in the Netherlands, in France, from the sixteenth century on, economic and political violence expropriated craftsmen and peasants, repressed indigence and vagrancy, imposed wage-labour on the poor. Between 1930 and 1950, Russia decreed a labour code which included capital punishment in order to organise the transition of millions of peasants to industrial wage-labour in less than a few decades. Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labour power, that he must sell it to a business unit to be able to live, that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around market exchange… such facts now taken for granted result from a long, brutal process.By means of its school system and its ideological and political life, contemporary society hides the past and present violence on which this situation rests. It conceals both its origin and the mechanism which enables it to function. Everything appears as a free contract in which the individual, as a seller of labour power, encounters the factory, the shop or the office. The existence of the commodity seems to be an obvious and natural phenomenon, and the periodic major and minor disasters it causes are often regarded as quasi-natural calamities. Goods are destroyed to maintain their prices, existing capacities are left to rot, while elementary needs remain unfulfilled. Yet the main thing that the system hides is not the existence of exploitation or class (that is not too hard to see), nor its horrors (modern society is quite good at turning them into media show). It is not even that the wage labour/capital relationship causes unrest and rebellion (that also is fairly plain to see). The main thing it conceals is that insubordination and revolt could be large and deep enough to do away with this relationship and make another world possible.
— Gilles Dauvé
Writing on architecture is not like history or poetry.
— Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture
Sadly, racial, ethnic, and cultural hatred and intolerance are not just history, they are current events.
— Steven Spielberg
We do not teach history
—  we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences - the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.
A bird flashed across the empty sky. A cart immobile on the horizon, like a midday star. How could a plain like this be remade? Yet someone would, no doubt, attempt to repeat their journey, sooner or later. This thought made them feel they should bet at once very careful and very daring: careful not to make a mistake that would render the repetition impossible; daring, so that the journey would be worth repeating, like an adventure.
— César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter
We have the right to demand that if we find men against whom there is not only suspicion, but almost a certainty that they have had collusion with men whose interests were in conflict with the interests of the public, they shall, at least, be required to bring positive facts with which to prove there has not been such collusion; and they ought themselves to have been the first to demand such an investigation." -Teddy Roosevelt
— Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism
... I grant you that anyone who pokes around in history long enough may well go mad.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity.
— Robert Charles Wilson, Burning Paradise
Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial ventures. They therefore developed an instrument which was at once an opiate and a spur. By every method of propaganda they sought to rouse the passions of nationalism and racial hatred. They created, in fact, the "Other Fascism", complete with lies, with mystical cult of race and state, with scorn of reason, with praise of brutal mastery, with appeal at once to the vilest and to the generous motives of the deluded young.
— Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker