c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Mohammed took his tribal customs and traditions and injected them into his new religion. Many of the ideas and traditions he implemented were already contained in the tribes he conquered, so in many cases, no major changes were required of his new followers. For example, most, if not all, of the tribes were polygamous. Women were seen primarily as chattel and under the complete control of their fathers or husbands. The communities of the new Islamic religion in the 600s CE often converted en masse. With minor modifications, they kept practicing their traditions. Mecca was already a major pagan religious shrine; Mohammed conveniently changed it into a place of worship and pilgrimage for Allah.Practically speaking, Mohammed unified a fracture region under a single religion and did it with a superior military. Conquest, war, and male predominance were the hallmarks of Islam. Despite political splits over the centuries, the tribal nature of Islam remains intact.
— Darrel Ray, Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality
He's the beating pulse of every cause dear to me.
— Stephanie Dray & Laura Kamoie
Efforts by Democrats to portray Jackson as 'manly' and for the 'common man' were apparently more effective than were the campaign tactics of Adams’s supporters, who attempted to depict Jackson as violent, unjust, a paramour, and even a poor speller. It is quite possible that this anti-Jackson propaganda actually reinforced the positive image of Jackson as a masculine commoner—especially when contrasted with that of Adams, whom the Democrats depicted as an over-refined aristocrat.
— Steven A. Seidman
Fillmore lost his party’s nomination the next year to yet another military hero, General Winfield 'Old Fuss and Feathers' Scott, an anti-slavery candidate who then lost the election to General Franklin Pierce (whose party’s slogan was 'We Polked you in 1844; we shall Pierce you in 1852').
— Steven A. Seidman, Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History
Before Sutter, native people had heeded the cycle of the seasons, time was infinite, and life's rhythms were unchanging. Now, for at least part of their lives, some Indians were wedded to a concept that proclaimed that time was limited and that it had economic value. The clang of Sutter's bell announced that time was money, that it marched onward, and that it waited for no man, including Indians in the 1840s.
— Albert L. Hurtado
Yet, some things do not change. Overall, designers have stayed with techniques that work—in different countries and historical periods. Flagg’s 'I Want You for U.S. Army' design in World War I, with 'Uncle Sam' looking directly at the viewer and pointing a finger at him, was derived from a British poster produced three years earlier; in the British poster, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener is pointing a finger at British males, with the words 'Wants You, Join Your Country’s Army! God Save The King.' Other countries—Italy, Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, France, the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Red Army in Russia, and later, the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War—designed similar posters. The British applied the same design idea in World War II, featuring Prime Minister Winston Churchill, instead of Kitchener, in the same pose; the U.S. Democratic Party resurrected Flagg’s Uncle Sam image, including it in an election poster for Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the decades that followed, however, anti-war protest groups issued satires of Flagg’s 'I Want You' poster, with 'Uncle Sam' in a variety of poses: pointing a gun at the audience; making the 'peace sign,' bandaged and accompanied by the slogan 'I Want Out'; as a skeleton, with a target superimposed on him; and with the 'bad breath' of airplanes dropping bombs on houses in his mouth.
— Steven A. Seidman, Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History
But history does repeat itself
—  that is the comedy and the crime of history. Men learn nothing. Times change. Scenes change. Names change. But passions are the same.
A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a thoughtful adage) religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the grave. In the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and softens the nature of things, and gives men courage to bear pain and hardship patiently; at every step the gods are with them, and will not let them perish, until they do. Even then a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it. If victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows; the life of the body gives way, in the dominant classes, to the life of the senses and the mind; toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude. At last men begin to doubt the gods; they mourn the tragedy of knowledge, and seek refuge in every passing delight. Achilles is at the beginning, Epicurus at the end. After David comes Job, and after Job, Ecclesiastes.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
The older America, until the 1890s and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of continental isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a flourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cosmopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American isolation and easy military security, the collapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the unrelenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.
— Richard Hofstadter
Many think that the mark of a great champion is the nature and margin of their victories and the peaks they scale and reach. That’s only part of it. The mark of the greatest of champions is how they react and respond to defeat. That is when they become enshrined in our hearts and minds – as they rise again and into the immortal pages of history.
— Rasheed Ogunlaru
The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide. There may not be - I believe that there is not - resurrection after death, but nothing could prove more conclusively than my own brief but eventful history the fact that resurrection is possible within our limited span of earthly time.
— Vera Brittain
The concerns and methods vary, but there is to it all, at bottom, a message that is unmistakably Luddistic: beware the technological juggernaut, reckon the terrible costs, understand the worlds being lost in the world being gained, reflect on the price of the machine and its systems on your life, pay attention to the natural world and its increasing destruction, resist the seductive catastrophe of industrialism.
— Kirkpatrick Sale
For most Americans, our most precious possession is citizenship in this amazing country.
— Ann Coulter
Historians of technology have asked why no industrial revolution developed in antiquity. The simple answer seems to be that there was no need, that contemporary modes of production and the slave-based economy of the day satisfactorily maintained the status quo. The capitalist idea of profit as a desirable end to pursue was completely foreign to the contemporary mentality. So, too, was the idea that technology on a large scale could or should be harnessed to those ends. An industrial revolution was literally unthinkable in antiquity.
— James E. McClellan
These rocks are too heavy, can't carry them any more,don't know why i ever picked them up before,going to have to put them down where they don't belong,'cause i can't get them back to where they came from.These rocks belong to no one, except history.Somewhere between the desert and the rolling sea,or maybe up in the mountains blue and tall,I picked them but now i'm going to let them fall.
— Jay Woodman
Really, the definition of what makes us “human” confuses me. Showing “humanity” is like this synonym for “treating others kindly” or “like you want to be treated” or whatever, when that isn’t really human at all. Whoever came up with that definition is a real scammer, and a real genius. More than anything else, humans have been terrible to each other throughout history, and this is still the way it works today and will continue to work. It’s how we’re wired. I have “human understanding”; that’s it.
— A.D. Aliwat, Alpha
They were lucky. They'd been given history.
— Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins
Facts do not become historical evidence until someone thinks up something for them to prove or disprove.
— Cary Carson
He found his irritation that the American memory could be short.
— James Carl Nelson, Five Lieutenants: The Heartbreaking Story of Five Harvard Men Who Led America to Victory in World War I
Poppy took a deep, appreciative breath. “How bracing,” she said. “I wonder what makes the country air smell so different?” “It could be the pig farm we just passed,” Leo muttered. Beatrix, who had been reading from a pamphlet describing the south of England, said cheerfully, “Hampshire is known for its exceptional pigs. They’re fed on acorns and beechnut mast from the forest, and it makes the bacon quite lovely. And there’s an annual sausage competition!” He gave her a sour look. “Splendid. I certainly hope we haven’t missed it.” Win, who had been reading from a thick tome about Hampshire and its environs, volunteered, “The history of Ramsay House is impressive.” “Our house is in a history book?” Beatrix asked in delight. “It’s only a small paragraph,” Win said from behind the book, “but yes, Ramsay House is mentioned. Of course, it’s nothing compared to our neighbor, the Earl of Westcliff, whose estate features one of the finest country homes in England. It dwarfs ours by comparison. And the earl’s family has been in residence for nearly five hundred years.” “He must be awfully old, then,” Poppy commented, straight-faced. Beatrix snickered. “Go on, Win.” “‘Ramsay House,’” Win read aloud, “‘stands in a small park populated with stately oaks and beeches, coverts of bracken, and surrounds of deer-cropped turf. Originally an Elizabethan manor house completed in 1594, the building boasts of many long galleries representative of the period. Alterations and additions to the house have resulted in the grafting of a Jacobean ballroom and a Georgian wing.’” “We have a ballroom!” Poppy exclaimed. “We have deer!” Beatrix said gleefully. Leo settled deeper into his corner. “God, I hope we have a privy.
— Lisa Kleypas, Mine Till Midnight
[T]here [is] no limit to what might not be achieved by an alliance between an imperial monarchy and revelations, if truly believed to be heaven-sent, of a prophet.
— Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
When blondes have more fun, do they know it?
— Lois Greiman, One Hot Mess
I may have not done History in high school but War cannot be ended by endless talks, only Cold War.
— Goitsemang Mvula
To fall for the notion of a 'double truth' and argue there was one set of truths for reason and another for faith and never the two shall meet made nonsense of the idea of truth itself.
— Arthur Herman
We need a new ethic of place, one that has room for salmon and skyscrapers, suburbs and wilderness, Mount Rainier and the Space Needle, one grounded in history.
— Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle
History is finite-there's only so much you can learn about a six square block historic district in New York City. (Dark City Lights)
— Kat Georges
That was 1993 grunge in suburbia. This was 2003 hell in Harlem. (Dark City Lights)
— Eve Kagan
History is going somewhere. And we know full well that He who does all things well will bring beauty from the ashes of world chaos. A new world is being born. A new social order will emerge when Christ comes back. A fabulous future is on the way.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
I felt a tightening in my chest, a sharp spike of intense sadness-almost like nostalgia, except it was for a life I never had.
— Katie Alender, Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer
Unlike the huge majority of the current generation in the West, the men on both sides at Dien Bien Phu did not live at a time or in places where they enjoyed the luxury of disregarding [that war is what human beings do]; and we, who are lifelong civilians, have not earned the right to sit in judgement over them.
— Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam
Men are the product of their historical experience, limited in their choices by who and where they are in history.
— Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1920
The opportunity of studying history, is the opportunity to experience empathy.
— John Green
I sought my liberty and the liberty of all, my happiness and the happiness of all. I wanted a roof for every family, bread for every mouth, education for every heart, light for every intellect. I am convinced that human history has not yet begun, that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric. I see with the eyes of my soul how the sky is diffused with the rays of the new millennium.
— Vanzetti
As is always the case, events do not conform easily to the generalizations historians produce to try to make sense of the past.
— Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1920
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
— Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.'Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.
— Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
If you live long enough, you see the same eyes in different people
— Star Wars: The Force Awakens
We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization. Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. The Egyptian pyramids, the temples and Greek statues—what a hideous crime they were! How much blood must have poured on to the Roman roads, the bulwarks, and the city walls. Antiquity—the tremendous concentration camp where the slave was branded on the forehead by his master, and crucified for trying to escape! Antiquity—the conspiracy of the free men against the slaves!.... If the Germans win the war, what will the world know about us? They will erect huge buildings, highways, factories, soaring monuments. Our hands will be placed under every brick, and our backs will carry the steel rails and the slabs of concrete. They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged. They will murder our children.And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion.
— Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
On Ryukyu islands, the expert Kara-te practitioners, used their skills to subdue, control and generally teach bullies A lesson, rather than severely injure or kill their attackers. They knew full well the consequences of their actions and the trail of blood and retribution that would ensue
— Soke Behzad Ahmadi, COMPLETE  OKINAWA  KARATE : Chin-na & Shuai-Jiao
Through The Mecca I saw that we were, in our own segregated body politic, cosmopolitans. The black diaspora was not just our own world but, in so many ways, the Western world itself. Now, the heirs of those Virginia planters could never directly acknowledge this legacy or reckon with its power. And so that beauty that Malcolm pledged us to protect, black beauty, was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was “white,” and so Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything else that was white “mattered.” And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Like ´Bluebeard´, the fairy tale of ´Snow White´does not record a single, appalling crime, but testifies to a structural and endemic conflict in society that was political and social as well as personal, producing many, many instances of similar violence.
— Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale
All the great moments of history have taken place inside people’s heads.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt
If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.
— Winston S. Churchill
Theories about world literature, of which fairy tale is a fundamental part, emphasize the porousness of borders, geographical and inguistic: no frontiercan keep a good story from roaming. It will travel, and travel far, and travel back again in a different guise, a changed mood, and, above all, a new meaning.
— Marina Warner, Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale
History is replete with blunders written by sycophants.
— Tomichan Matheikal
I began to consider the fact that maybe history is actually the great destroyer of free will.
— Andrew  Smith, Grasshopper Jungle
Historiography -- commonly and often simultaneously defined as the study of historians' scholarship, how history has been and is contrived, the history of historical writing, and the body of historical scholarship on historical subject matter -- is, therefore, essential to understand when studying history.
— Pero Gaglo Dagbovie, What Is African American History?
... the reader is probably wondering that if Tolkien did indeed fashion two of his heroic characters from Catholic prophecies, what about the evil protagonists? Were any of them inspired by these little-known revelations concerning future times? The answer is yes, but to discover the links between the myth and the prophecies, we must venture not only into the realm of unnerving revelations, but also into the murky world of secret sects, dark plots, occult signs, bloody revolutions and conspiracy theories ~ we must probe deep into the burning Eye of Sauron.
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Lord of the Rings: Apocalyptic Prophecies
The historian's rightful task is to distil experience as a medicinal warning for the future generations, not to distil a drug.
— B.H. Liddell Hart
I miss those days even though I wasn't alive.
— Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
I never want to see umbrellas around me." he [Mussolini] once said. "The umbrella is a bourgeois relic, it is the arm used by the pope's soldiers. A people who carry umbrellas cannot found an empire.
— David I. Kertzer, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe
[Giving context to how radical bloomers as an article of clothing were at the time]"The women shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord they God." - Deutronomy 22:5
— Miriam Gurko, The Ladies of Seneca Falls: the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement
An angry discussion followed, during which belligerent ministers, who had come to the convention in an attempt to disrupt it, read aloud passages from the Bible to disprove Antoinette Brown's contention of equality. They read passages like "Let your women be silent in the churches; for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience," and "Likewise, ye wives, be in subection to your own husbands.
— Miriam Gurko, The Ladies of Seneca Falls: the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement
Almost from the beginning, Lucy Stone had run-ins with the established code of female propriety. Every Sunday morning the students had to sit through a long chapel service. Lucy, who suffered from headaches, took her hat off one morning. She was charged by the Ladies' Board, which supervised the manners and morals of the coeds, with violating the Bible's teach that women must keep their heads covered in church.
— Miriam Gurko, The Ladies of Seneca Falls: the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement
In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos
— George F. Will, The Woven Figure: Conservatism and America's Fabric
Tolkien did admit that, 'As a guide, I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving.' In other words ~ he wrote about what interested him ~ and despite his protestation of including anything allegorical into his tale, Catholic history and mystic prophecy obviously received its fair share of attention ...
— E.A. Bucchianeri, Lord of the Rings: Apocalyptic Prophecies
Those who have chosen to provide for the health and well being of others. Call them homoeopaths, allopaths and whatever one may, they must remember, they have been called and have chosen to serve. Dr. Ron Harris - 1965
— Dr. Ron Harris
... on May 1, 1855, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell were married. Before the minister began the ceremony, Henry read the protest which he and Lucy had prepared: "While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relation of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare this act ... implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to, such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess
— Miriam Gurko, The Ladies of Seneca Falls: the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement
What these thinkers, chroniclers, and interpreters have written about, how they have theorized their scholarly endeavors, and their approaches and methodologies have inevitably been informed and shaped by the times in which they existed.
— Pero Gaglo Dagbovie
The world we have created has problems, that can be resolved by rich getting richer, bu by sharing we can. Ron Harris - 2008
— Dr. Ron Harris
The land has a memory. Every stream and river runs with a confession of sorts, history whispered over rocks, lifted in the beaks of birds at a stream, carried out to the sea. Buffalo thunder across plains whose soil was watered with the blood of battles long since relegated to musty books on forgotten shelves. Fields once strewn with blue and gray now flower with uneasy buds. The slave master snaps the lash, and generations later, the ancestral scars remain.Under it all, the dead lie, remembering.
— Libba Bray, Lair of Dreams
a great reason why a gloomy history may repeat itself is that we may have neglected what history did. When we neglect what history did, history visits us in the same cloth
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
History has always been violent, unstoppable and bound to happen; either with or without you. Acknowledge it.
— Mamur Mustapha
It is often said that Islam is an egalitarian religion. There is much truth in this assertion. If we compare Islam at the time of its advent with the societies that surrounded it—the stratified feudalism of Iran and the caste system of India to the east, the privileged aristocracies of both Byzantine and Latin Europe to the west—the Islamic dispensation does indeed bring a message of equality. Not only does Islam not endorse such systems of social differentiation; it explicitly and resolutely rejects them. The actions and utterances of the Prophet, the honored precedents of the early rulers of Islam as preserved by tradition, are overwhelmingly against privilege by descent, by birth, by status, by wealth, or even by race, and insist that rank and honor are determined only by piety and merit in Islam.
— Bernard Lewis
Our lives are encumbered with the dead wood of this past; all that is dead and has served its purpose has to go. But that does not mean a break with, or a forgetting of, the vital and life-giving in that past. We can never forget the ideals that have moved our race, the dreams of the Indian people through the ages, the wisdom of the ancients, the buoyant energy and love of life and nature of our forefathers, their spirit of curiosity and mental adventure, the daring of their thought, their splendid achievements in literature, art and culture, their love of truth and beauty and freedom, the basic values that they set up, their understanding of life's mysterious ways, their toleration of other ways than theirs, their capacity to absorb other peoples and their cultural accomplishments, to synthesize them and develop a varied and mixed culture; nor can we forget the myriad experiences which have built up our ancient race and lie embedded in our sub-conscious minds. We will never forget them or cease to take pride in that noble heritage of ours. If India forgets them she will no longer remain India and much that has made her our joy and pride will cease to be.
— Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India
The past is rich history. The present is sacred inscription. The future is yet to be written.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
At the root of everything lay the passionatedesire of thinking people to find a simple, unifying norm for society like the law of gravity that Newton had found for nature.
— James H. Billington
Vigilantes who executed some of the most vicious and ignoble acts of lawless brutality in U.S. history nevertheless considered those very acts to be the work of citizenship and in many cases elicited wide popular approval.
— Linda Gordon
On coming out of the chapel, a well can be seen on the left. There are two in this yard. You ask, Why is there no bucket and no pulley to this one? Because no water is drawn from it now. Why is no more water drawn from it? Because it is full of skeletons.
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
The written word is the greatest sacred documentation.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
Equal rights meant just that, rights for both blacks and women, with the association working for both at the same time. Women should not be told to "stand back and wait." [Frederick] Douglas said that women should be generous and allow the Negro to get his vote first. A young woman in the audience replied that she did not think it generous "to compel women to yield on all questions ... simply because they are women.
— Miriam Gurko, The Ladies of Seneca Falls: the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement
History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.
— Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History Of Ethics: A History Of Moral Philosophy From The Homeric Age To The Twentieth Century
[S]hame is a child of custom rather than of nature.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time.He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.
— Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Surely it is foolish to hate facts. The struggle against the past is a futile struggle. Acceptance seems so much more like wisdom. I know all this. And yet there are some facts that one must never, never accept. This is not merely an emotional matter. The reason that one must hate certain facts is that one must prepare for the possibility of their return. If the past were really past, then one might permit oneself an attitude of acceptance, and come away from the study of history with a feeling of serenity. But the past is often only an earlier instantiation of the evil in our hearts. It is not precisely the case that history repeats itself. We repeat history—or we do not repeat it, if we choose to stand in the way of its repetition. For this reason, it is one of the purposes of the study of history that we learn to oppose it.
— Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish
Only the victor gets to write history
—  where half of the facts are distorted and the other half invented.
Han Solo.A legend of the Rebellion against the Empire. Trader, pirate, con man, and fighter extraordinaire. It was hard to believe he was real, Finn thought. Solo was history come to life.
— Alan Dean Foster, Star Wars - The Force Awakens
The written word is greatest sacred documentation.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
O, worldly pomp, how despicable you are when one considers that you are empty and fleeting ! You are justly compared to watery bubbles, one moment all swollen up, then suddenly reduced to nothing.
— Ordericus Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, Volume 2
Life is a rich literature. We are only writing the history of our time.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
We are only writing the history of our time.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of  Wisdom: Great  mind
In 1991, after fifty years of brutal occupation, the three Baltic countries regained their independence, peacefully and with dignity. They chose hope over hate and showed the world that even through the darkest night, there is light. These three tiny nations have taught us that love is the most powerful army. Whether love of a friend, love of country, love of God, or even love of enemy- love reveals to us the truly miraculous nature of the human spirit.
— Ruta Sepetys, Between Shades of Gray
Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don't remember it.
— Paul Krugman
So eager were its officials that the German government had telegraphed its ambassador in St. Petersburg two declarations of war to be delivered to Russia's foreign minister: one if Russia did not reply to its ultimatum, the other rejecting the Russian reply as unsatisfactory. In his haste and confusion, the ambassador handed over both messages.
— Adam Hochschild
May the new era be an era of liberty and respect for everyone--including writers! Only through liberty and respect for culture can Europe be saved from the cruel days of which Montesquieu spoke in the Esprit des lois: "Thus, in the days of fables, after the floods and deluges, there came forth from the soil armed men who exterminated each other." Boook XXXII, Chapter XXIII.
— Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt
[Queen Victoria had been denouncing the Women's Rights movement] ... And after chloroform was introduced to ease the pains of childbirth, she demanded that it be used on her. Religious and medical conservatives were shocked. They said God had decreed that women must suffer in childbirth as atonement for the sins of Eve. But queen Victoria wouldn't accept this particular anti-woman's-rights dictum. She became one of the first women to use anesthesia during childbirth , and knighted Dr. James Simpson, the Scottish physician who developed this use of chloroform, though he was excommunicated by his church for doing so.
— Miriam Gurko
In 1879, Massachusetts allow women to vote in school elections. Lucy Stone went to register, but when she discovered that she would have to sign as Mr.s Blackwell, she refused, and so forfeited her opportunity to vote.Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony were delighted. Mr.s Stanton wrote to Mrs. Stone : "Nothing has been done in the woman's rights movement for some time that so rejoiced my heart as the announcement by you of a woman's right to her name." Susan Anthony wrote that she "rejoiced that you have declared, by actual doing, that a woman has a name, and may retain it throughout her life."Some women in the movement disapproved, however, and wrote to tell her so. She replied that "A thousand times more opposition was made to a woman's claim to speak in public," and continued to use the name of Lucy Stone for the rest of her life. Those who followed her example were called "Lucy Stoners." But in spite of Lucy Stone and the Lucy Stoners, the law has been slow to acknowledge the right of a woman to her own name. More than a hundred years later, in the 1970s, the Supreme Court would uphold an Alabama law which required a woman to use her husband's name.
— Miriam Gurko, The Ladies of Seneca Falls: the Birth of the Women's Rights Movement
Thus she returned to the theme of ‘before,’ but in a different way than she had at first. She said that we didn’t know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighborhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever even thinking about it. Not just us. Her father pretended that there had been nothing before. Her mother did the same, my mother, my father, even Rino… <…> They didn’t know anything, they wouldn’t talk about anything. Not Fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation … And they thought that what had happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they placed a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.
— Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
The thing that drew me to Lafayette as a subject - that he was that rare object of agreement in the ironically named United States - kept me coming back to why that made him unique. Namely, that we the people never agreed on much of anything. Other than a bipartisan consensus on barbecue and Meryl Streep, plus that time in 1942 when everyone from Bing Crosby to Oregonian school children heeded FDR's call to scrounge up rubber for the war effort, disunity is the through line in the national plot - not necessarily as a failing, but as a free people's privilege. And thanks to Lafayette and his cohorts in Washington's army, plus the king of France and his navy, not to mention the founding dreamers who clearly did not think through what happens every time one citizen's pursuit of happiness infuriates his neighbor, getting on each other's nerves is our right.
— Sarah Vowell
History isn't written by the winners OR the losers
—  it's written by the writers.
Thousands of years ago--in times we are fond of calling "primitive" (since this renders us "modern" without having to exert ourselves further to earn this qualification)...
— Thomas Szasz
War is always a contest of words as well as of wounds.
— Samuel Moyn
While victors may get to write history, novelists get to write/right reality.
— M.T. Bass
I have come to realize that in life and politics, there is always more to take into consideration.
— Michael Bronski
Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation’s history?
— Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America
History proved many times that path of millions was often the wrong path!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Live your best sacred-life. It is only one-time in history.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Daily we make decisions, sometimes small, sometimes large, that affect our lives.Usually we know the events and people that influence these decisions.However sometimes we have no knowledge, and may never know, of the events and people that change the course of our lives.
— Valverde MacLean, The Disappearance of Merry: An Historic Australian Goldfield, an Old Romance, an Older Mystery, Present Day Danger
For it is better to drink a wholesome draught of truth from the humble vessel, than poison mixed with honey from a golden goblet.
— Nennius
Today is the beginning of new history.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
The lintel of more than one collapsed Venetian house on Crete bears the Latin motto ‘The world is nothing but smoke and shadows’.
— Roger Crpwley
a brief history of artCave paintings. Clay then bronze statues. Then for about 1,400 years, people painted nothing except bold but rudimentary pictures of either the Virgin Mary and Child or the Crucifixion. Some bright spark realised that things in the distance looked smaller and the pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Crucifixion improved hugely. Suddenly everyone was good at hands and facial expression and now the statues were in marble. Fat cherubs started appearing, while elsewhere there was a craze for domestic interiors and women standing by windows doing needlework. Dead pheasants and bunches of grapes and lots of detail. Cherubs disappeared and instead there were fanciful, idealised landscapes, then portraits of aristocrats on horseback, then huge canvasses of battles and shipwrecks. Then it was back to women lying on sofas or getting out of the bath, murkier this time, less detailed then a great many wine bottles and apples, then ballet dancers. Paintings developed a certain splodginess - critical term - so that they barely resembled what they were meant to be. Someone signed a urinal, and it all went mad. Neat squares of primary colour were followed by great blocks of emulsion, then soup cans, then someone picked up a video camera, someone else poured concrete, and the whole thing became hopelessly fractured into a kind of confusing, anything-goes free for all.
— David Nicholls
History make us smarter. Learn it before being to late.
— Ricardo Freire
We can only predict the future ecological changes, by emergence of the past into the present.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Snuffy and the Bull is one of several short stories from a time in our history which has been woven into the quilt of America and found within the eclectic tapestry of our culture.
— Regine' Ivory-Barlow
Some points in time cannot flow. Think of those big-ticket moments, the ones you could still recite from fifth grade: your 1492 and Civil Wars, the Titanic and presidential assassinations. These are icebergs, solid and immense, forcing incalculable eddies to swirl around them.
— Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring
To use the past, he had to save it from aspects of itself.
— Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln
Look at the longing, the anguish of a sad fossil world / that cannot find the accent of its first sob.
— Federico García Lorca
Life is a great Book. We are writing the history of our time.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
It is incredible what a pronounced hero can get away with and what can be accredited to him. There were no inconvenient questions asked of Robin because everyone preferred to believe that heroes defeat villains and that there were distinguishable traits that could easily tell the two apart.
— Arianna Alexsandra Collins, Hearken To Avalon
Being different and thinking different makes a person unforgettable. History does not remember the forgettable.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.
— Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
The heavy warlike losses of the AIDS years were relegated to queer studies classrooms, taught as gay history and not American history.
— Alysia Abbott, Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father
There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feelingin a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not a familar echo of the present, for if it is familar why revist it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.
— Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories
Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
— Thomas Mann
The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.
— Joseph Epstein
For what is philosophy but an art - one more attempt to give "significant form" to the chaos of experience?
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
To make his point, Ivan staged a sensational demonstration. Some time before Christmas he had arrested two Lithuanians employed in the Moscow Kremlin. He charged them with plotting to poison him. The accusations against Jan Lukhomski and Maciej the Pole did not sound very credible; but their guilt or innocence was hardly relevant. They were held in an open cage on the frozen Moskva River for all the world to see; and on the eve of the departure of Ivan’s envoy to Lithuania, they were burned alive in their cage.50 As the ice melted under the fierce heat of the fire and the heavy iron cage sank beneath the water, taking its carbonized occupants down in a great hiss of steam, one could have well imagined that something was being said about Lithuania’s political future.
— Norman Davies, Europe
I don't know what's wrong with this world, but I do know what's right with it: Love. I have studied enough history to see that no matter how cruel the behavior of tyrants and no matter how dark the moments have been, Love has always prevailed. Always.
— Steve Maraboli
We may rifle the treasures of antiquity and make the heathen contribute to the gospel even as Hiram of Tyre served under Solomon's direction for the building of the Temple.
— Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students
It's possible to satisfy the needs of the inner life by an intimate communion with nature, or by knowledge of the past.
— Adolf Hitler
Winners are the favourites of heaven.
— Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire
[R]eligion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness and loneliness of man.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become.
— Fawn M. Brodie
History is the enemy of memory.
— Richard White
There exist continuation of time; past, present and future.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
The Planeswalker knowYOu take the card from the libraryAnd bury it when you're done.On the path, you face history.Walk the path, do the math:Start with the prime numbers under 100Whose digits give you 10.Choose the happy median.Add it to: The square root of The cube of five divided byThe sum of 3 and 2.
— Megan Frazer Blakemore, The Friendship Riddle
History provides a great example but a terrible excuse.
— Liz Curtis Higgs, Bad Girls of the Bible: And What We Can Learn from Them
The title ‘Lord of All-Rus'’ did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself ‘Lord of all the Franks’. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the ‘Ruthenes’ of Lithuania had assumed from the ‘Russians’ of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan’s good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years.
— Norman Davies, Europe
The first source of art, then, is akin to the display of colors and plumage on the male animal in mating time; it lies in the desire to adorn and beautify the body. And just as self-love and mate-love, overflowing, pour out their surplus of affection upon nature, so the impulse to beautify passes from the personal to the external world. The soul seeks to express its feeling in objective ways, through color and form; art really begins when men undertake tobeautify things.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
He might be better considered as an exponent of Tartar financial, military, and political methods, who used the shifting alliances of khans and princes to replace the Tartar yoke with a Muscovite one. In his struggle with the Golden Horde, whose hegemony he definitively rejected after 1480, his closest ally was the Khan of the Crimea, who helped him to attack the autonomy of his fellow Christian principalities to a degree that the Tartars had never attempted. From the Muscovite point of view, which later enjoyed a monopoly, ‘Ivan the Great’ was the restorer of ‘Russian’ hegemony. From the viewpoint of the Novgorodians or the Pskovians he was the Antichrist, the destroyer of Russia’s best traditions. When he came to write his will, he described himself, as his father had done, as ‘the much-sinning slave of God’.
— Norman Davies
When it comes to anniversaries, the publishing industry usually resembles distant relatives, readiest with gifts that are redundant or farcical.
— Anthony Paletta
We study the past history, with the conscience of the present environmental changes; we can only predict the future ecological changes, by emergence of the past into the present.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
While we cannot live without history, we need not live within it either.
— Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity
Some years back Richard Nixon warned the American peoplethat Russia was bad because she had not kept any treaty oragreement signed with her. You can trust the Communists, thesaying went, to be Communists.Indian people laugh themselves sick when they hear thesestatements. America has yet to keep one Indian treaty or agreementdespite the fact that the United States government signedover four hundred such treaties and agreements with Indiantribes. It would take Russia another century to make and breakas many treaties as the United States has already violated.
— Vine Deloria Jr.
Who doesn’t respect and value his past, is not worth the honour of the present, and has no right to a future.
— Józef Piłsudski
It’s not that I can’t remember. It’s that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough, An Autumn's Journey: Deep Growth in the Grief and Loss of Life's Seasons