c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Beneath history, memory and forgettingBeneath memory and forgetting, life.
— Paul Ricœur
The conundrum of the twenty-first (century) is that with the best intentions of color blindness, and laws passed in this spirit, we still carry instincts and reactions inherited from our environments and embedded in our being below the level of conscious decision. There is a color line in our heads, and while we could see its effects we couldn’t name it until now. But john powell is also steeped in a new science of “implicit bias,” which gives us a way, finally, even to address this head on. It reveals a challenge that is human in nature, though it can be supported and hastened by policies to create new experiences, which over time create new instincts and lay chemical and physical pathways. This is a helpfully unromantic way to think about what we mean when we aspire, longingly, to a lasting change of heart. And john powell and others are bringing training methodologies based on the new science to city governments and police forces and schools. What we’re finding now in the last 30 years is that much of the work, in terms of our cognitive and emotional response to the world, happens at the unconscious level.
— Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living
The Umayyad caliphate stretched from Spain to India, making it the largest empire in the world
— Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past
Rapid expansion coupled with social stability is proof of Umar's incredible capabilities as a leader
— Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past
Like the pioneering Muslim scientists, Al Bukhari insisted on an empirical, organized method in the science of fiqh and hadith
— Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past
In the 10th century, Baghdad instituted a licensing exam that all doctors had to take before practicing as physicians
— Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past
History of humanity is nothing but a history of loyalty!
— Sanjai Velayudhan, Dance of the Spirits: A Novel
Basic trigonometric properties put forth by Muslim mathematicians serve as basis for how GPS systems work today
— Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past
The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The world's oldest university, University of Karaouin, was established by a Muslim woman in Fez, Morocco in 859
— Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past
Ali was the natural choice as he was the most respected Companion still alive and was related to Prophet in two ways
— Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past
It is only a woman who can make a man feel like a 'superhero' or 'inadequate'.Its her attention and admiration that a man desperately seeks!
— Sanjai Velayudhan, Dance of the Spirits: A Novel
Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially those which are fruitful" - Abu Bak's warfare rules, to his army
— Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past
The principle must always rule that ideas are not born of other ideas, philosophies of other philosophies; they are a continually renewed of real historical development. The unity of history (what the idealists call unity of the spirit) is not a presupposition, but a continuously developing process.
— Antonio Gramcsi
If you do not have a history, you do not have a future!
— Sanjai Velayudhan, Dance of the Spirits: A Novel
A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White
I know history. There are many names in historybut none of them are ours.
— Richard Siken, Crush
The traditions of . . . bygone times, even to the smallest social particular, enable one to understand more clearly the circumstances with contributed to the formation of character. The daily life into which people are born, and into which they are absorbed before they are well aware, forms chains which only one in a hundred has moral strength enough to despise, and to break when the right time comes - when an inward necessity for independent individual action arises, which is superior to all outward conventionalities. Therefore it is well to know what were the chains of daily domestic habit which were the natural leading-strings of our forefathers before they learnt to go alone.
— Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth
Harun AlRashid known for his wealth & diplomatic relations, sent an embassy to France that included an elephant & a water clock
— Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past
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 neighbourhood, 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. And yet Stefano's grocery store before, had been the carpenter shop of Alfredo Peluso, Pasquale's father. And yet Don Achille's money had been made before. And the Solaras' money as well. She had tested this out on her father and mother. They didn't know anything, they wouldn't talk about anything. Not Fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation. They hated Don Achille and were afraid of the Solaras. But they overlooked it and went to spend their money both at Don Achille's son's and at the Solaras', and sent us, too. And they votes for the Fascists, for the monarchists, as the Solaras wanted them to. 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, The Story of a New Name
As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. The atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes...
— Stefan Zweig
During Uthman's caliphate, a Muslim embassy was sent to China to establish diplomatic relations
— Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past
Have been most timid of cowards from day of birth," replied Li Han, without shame, "and this is an inauspicious day."- "No it ain't," said Olaf, "it ban Thursday.
— The Road to Samarcand
It is tempting to write the history of technology through products: the wheel
—  the microscope
History repeats itself, in part because the genome repeats itself. And the genome repeats itself, in part because history does. The impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires that drive human history are, at least in part, encoded in the human genome. And human history has, in turn, selected genomes that carry these impulses, ambitions, fantasies, and desires. This self-fulfilling circle of logic is responsible for some of the most magnificent and evocative qualities in our species, but also some of the most reprehensible. It is far too much to ask ourselves to escape the orbit of this logic, but recognizing its inherent circularity, and being skeptical of its overreach, might protect the week from the will of the strong, and the 'mutant' from being annihilated by the 'normal'.
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities an compelling nostalgias.
— Adam Phillips
At the end of a century that has seenthe evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies,the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.
— Joseph Sobran
[While writing history], I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read other people's mail.
— David McCullough
Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.
— Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self
Since the dawn of time, nearly every man (and I'd wager to guess most women) has, at his most visceral level, secretly desired for one thing - to be standing triumphantly atop a heaping pile of his slain enemies, holding a gigantic axe aloft while some unbelievably attractive member of whatever gender he's attracted to desperately clutches his leg like it's the last life raft on the HMS Titanic.
— Ben Thompson, Badass: Ultimate Deathmatch: Skull-Crushing True Stories of the Most Hardcore Duels, Showdowns, Fistfights, Last Stands, Suicide Charges, and Military Engagements of All Time
With an accelerated schedule of launch in just two months, NASA and contractor launch and support teams labor steadily with six-day work weeks by day and night shifts
— Martha Lemasters, The Step: One Woman's Journey to Finding Her Own Happiness and Success During the Apollo Space Program
Frederick's wit was impressive. When a descendant of Ghengis Khan, who was wreaking havoc in the Muslim world, wrote threateningly that the holy Roman Emperor should surrender his lands and come to his court to become one of his vassals, Frederick replied that he'd think about it and to please hold open the position of falconer.
— Nancy Goldstone, Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe
Archaeological discoveries made in Egypt and in the Near East in the past hundred years have opened our eyes to a spiritual and cultural heritage undreamed of by earlier generations.
— Samuel Noah Kramer
Nothing Happens for the First Time
— Craig L. Delue, Brian Nine
When we think carefully about the past, we get to know and understand not just what happened in the past but what really went into things that happened in the past.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Much of history turns out to be the consequence of small acts of fortune, accident or luck, good or bad.
— Phil Mason, Napoleon's Hemorrhoids: And Other Small Events That Changed History
Lucky nation is the one who has at least one great progressive revolutionary man in its history!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
History wasn't just a collection of dates I memorized from textbooks
—  it was tactile and ever present
Many of the Cape employees work 16 to 18 hour shifts a day. The Cape area earns the title of number one in divorces for the whole country.
— Martha Lemasters, The Step: One Woman's Journey to Finding Her Own Happiness and Success During the Apollo Space Program
The whole of history is the history of murderers. If you become a murderer, fame will be very easy. You can become a prime minister, you can become a president—but these are all masks. Behind them you will find very violent people, terribly violent people hiding, smiling. Those smiles are political, diplomatic. If the mask slips, you will always see Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah, Napoleon, Alexander, Hitler, hiding behind.
— Osho, Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within
The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Our ancestors wholeheartedly sacrificed their lives to fight against tyranny, and we are allowing that very same tyranny to exist! Let us open our eyes!
— Yanan Melo, Naaalala Niyo Ba Ang Noli Me Tangere?
Wainwright prayed to the graven image of Lafayette, since neither the president nor Congress seemed to be listening. “We, the women of the United States,” she told the bronze Lafayette, “denied the liberty which you helped to gain, and for which we have asked in vain for sixty years, turn to you to plead for us. Speak, Lafayette, dead these hundred years but still living in the hearts of the American people.
— Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
For walk where we will, we tread upon some story.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his,
— Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland
History is not always pessimistic for if World War II Europe has taught us anything it is that the rebuilding of cities is possible and the mending of a nation’s spirit can be achieved.
— Aysha Taryam
Hitler initially served in the List Regiment engaged in a violent four-day battle near Ypres, in Belgian Flanders, with elite British professional soldiers of the initial elements of the British Expeditionary Force. Hitler thereby served as a combat infantryman in one of the most intense engagements of the opening phase of World War I. The List Regiment was temporarily destroyed as an offensive force by suffering such severe casualty rates (killed, wounded, missing, and captured) that it lost approximately 70 percent of its initial strength of around 3,600 men. A bullet tore off Hitler’s right sleeve in the first day of combat, and in the “batch” of men with which he originally advanced, every one fell dead or wounded, leaving him to survive as if through a miracle. On November 9, 1914, about a week after the ending of the great battle, Hitler was reassigned as a dispatch runner to regimental headquarters. Shortly thereafter, he was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class.On about November 14, 1914, the new regimental commander, Lieutenant Colonel Philipp Engelhardt, accompanied by Hitler and another dispatch runner, moved forward into terrain of uncertain ownership. Engelhardt hoped to see for himself the regiment’s tactical situation. When Engelhardt came under aimed enemy smallarms fire, Hitler and the unnamed comrade placed their bodies between their commander and the enemy fire, determined to keep him alive. The two enlisted men, who were veterans of the earlier great four-day battle around Ypres, were doubtlessly affected by the death of the regiment’s first commander in that fight and were dedicated to keeping his replacement alive. Engelhardt was suitably impressed and proposed Hitler for the Iron Cross Second Class, which he was awarded on December 2. Hitler’s performance was exemplary, and he began to fit into the world around him and establish the image of a combat soldier tough enough to demand the respect of anyone in right wing, Freikorps-style politics after th
— Russel H.S. Stolfi
Baron Humboldt asked Jefferson, "Why are these libels allowed? Why is not this libelous journal suppressed, or its editor at least, fined and imprisoned? The question gave Jefferson a perfect opening. "Put that paper in your pocket, Baron, and should you hear the reality of our liberty, the freedom of our press, questioned, show this paper, and tell where you found it.
— Jon Meacham
Only Marxists," Dr. Iggy concluded, opening the door to usher Joe into the chapel room, "stillbelieve in an objective history. Marxists and a few disciples of Ayn Rand.
— Robert Shea, The Eye in the Pyramid
No doubt the foregoing litany of obstacles in the path of success stands out more sharply in retrospect than it did at the time. Hindsight can distort
—  prophets become prophets only in time.
Every nation needs a crystal clear mirror to see its stupidities, to see its hypocrisies, to see its faults and its evils! No nation is saint! Every nation’s history is full of primitiveness and barbarity, full of wars and murders! Let every nation sees its face very clearly! Let them face their faces so that in the future they may be something better!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
This, then, is the legacy of January 1973. The "me generation" found its voice, religion became a political force, poverty and civil rights became someone else's problem, and the national will for concerted action for the common good of all its citizens was scattered into "a thousand points of light."At some point, perhaps those scattered lights will re-form and reunite to give birth to a rededicated nation, one that includes a place for everyone, opportunity for all, and help for those who need it. After all, it only takes a moment in time and some simultaneity. As Lyndon Johnson so aptly observed in his greatest speech - the "We Shall Overcome" speech - there are times in America when "history and fate meet at a single time in a single space to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom."Let us hop such a time is nearing.
— James Robenalt, January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month That Changed America Forever
I notice perfume smells on his shirts and even later hours. I suspect he's having an affair but really don't care.
— Martha Lemasters, The Step: One Woman's Journey to Finding Her Own Happiness and Success During the Apollo Space Program
The complete Apollo team...directly involves slightly over 400,000 people...Included are some if the country's foremost scientists and engineers. This mobilization of men and resources is unprecedented in history since WWII
— Martha Lemasters, The Step: One Woman's Journey to Finding Her Own Happiness and Success During the Apollo Space Program
At breakfast one Saturday I decided to tell Hank my desire to go back to work. He explodes, 'What can you do? You can't make enough to buy your own Kotex
— Martha Lemasters, The Step: One Woman's Journey to Finding Her Own Happiness and Success During the Apollo Space Program
Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ( “Not without the past”)
— Erik Pevernagie
When we are “time traveling”, we may trip over problems from the past which distort our memory. If we are weary of dealing with lost causes or lame ducks in our history, we have to make up our mind and give up destructive thinking patterns. At that juncture, time has come to go back to the future. ( “A glimpse of the future" )
— Erik Pevernagie
Judgement is always based on experience and sometimes you will battle a person's history first, before commonsense will ever win the war.
— Shannon L. Alder
History rhymes, but geography endures.
— Andrew C. Katen
So the next time you doubt the strangeness of the future, remember how you were born in a hunter-gatherer tribe ten thousand years ago, when no one knew of Science at all. Remember how you were shocked, to the depths of your being, when Science explained the great and terrible sacred mysteries that you once revered so highly. Remember how you once believed that you could fly by eating the right mushrooms, and then you accepted with disappointment that you would never fly, and then you flew. Remember how you had always thought that slavery was right and proper, and then you changed your mind. Don't imagine how you could have predicted the change, for that is amnesia. Remember that, in fact, you did not guess. Remember how, century after century, the world changed in ways you did not guess.Maybe then you will be less shocked by what happens next.
— Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies
Chicks dig historians.
— Cynthia Hand, Unearthly
it is very tempting, when you talk about the events of the past, to impose clarity and order upon what had neither one nor the other.
— René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking
Truth is only relative to those that ignore hard evidence.
— A.E. Samaan
I became a Libertarian as a result of researching WWII and the Holocaust. Individual liberty is sacred.
— A.E. Samaan
That was the problem with ones actions. They would always remain ‘acted’. They always remained ‘being done’, and their influence on the world, whether small or big , would always be palpable. You couldn't refute the past. He would always remain liable for the consequences of his actions. Should anyone knock on his door and ask for reparation, he would give what was asked of him without question. There simply was no way of clearing the world of its history, and its history was simply a compilation of the existence of people and other organisms , and their actions. Of things which had been done.
— Adelheid Manefeldt, Consequence
Why Anglo-Saxon history?” At the time it had struck the Gray Man as a foolish and unanswerable question. The things that drew him to that time period were surely unconscious and many-headed, diffused through his blood from a lifetime of influences.
— Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves
Seek to know the history of the sacred souls.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The mysteries of life enfold with time.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
History has a way of chasing gravity just like water, feeding into other parts of itself to become something else, something larger and grander, until the one pure thing it was no longer exists.
— James          Anderson, The Never-Open Desert Diner
Past is PrologueThis book was written observing the premise that the seeds of Holocaust denial take root and prosper with misinformation. Clarity and transparency are imperative, as they leave no room for denial theories that would deprive the victims justice, or rob the living of a future. Generations of historians have enthusiastically gone about their craft knowing full well that 'he who owns the past, owns the future'. Improperly documented history, or more precisely, fraudulent versions of history not only deprive the victims of pasts injustices due recognition of their suffering, but also rob the living of a fair chance at a future free from the dangers of repeating past injustices.
— A.E. Samaan, From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848
The history of time is captured by poet, artist, writer, photographer…!
— Lailah Gifty Akita
The claim "oh, that's ancient history" is almost always a wish, am anxious attempt to put a boundary of time around some event that really is not over at all; it is a bid to silence the past.
— Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950
The aim here is not to separate fact from fantasy but to show how each embodies a distinct class of knowledge and how one is deeply implicated in the other.
— Constance Penley
Plant in the land of children whatever you wish to see in the life of our times
— Lucy Wheelock
The situation come back again but you will not act like before again.Saily Badsha
— Saily Badsha
The situation come back again but you will not act like before again.
— Sohail Umar
Even the poorest pit houses usually possess a state-sponsored Volkempfanger VE301, a mass-produced radio stamped with an eagle and a swastika, incapable of shortwave, marked only for German frequencies.Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if toward the lips of God.
— Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
We write the history of our time.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
One could not see the Greek, the Celt, the Roman, the man of the Renaissance, not even the Victorian on a white face, for Western civilisation had moved too fast to leave any telltale signs of the past on the European skin. She thought: the white face is without history: too familiar, too unremarkable – always modern. But a look at an Indian face sends the mind travelling back a thousand years. The Olmec, the Maya, the Toltec, the Mexica were still there in the coppery skin, the prominent nose, the high cheekbones, the epicanthic fold, the brown eyes staring back from the deep well of time.
— Panos Karnezis, The Fugitives
There are so many people who’ve come before us,arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo.Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them,generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay.I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.
— Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things
American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany's persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was reeling from the Depression.
— Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
Old-growth forests met no needs. They simply were, in a way that bore no questions about purpose or value. They could not be created by men. They could not even be understood by men. They had too many parts that were interconnected in too many ways. Change one part and everything else would change, but in ways that were unpredictable and often inexplicable. This unpredictability removed such forests from the realm of human perspectives and values. The forest did not need to justify or explain itself. It existed outside of instrumental human considerations.
— Steve Olson
Empowered Women 101: The moment you ignore bad behavior, in order to win a person's affection you have not won anything, but a person that has behavioral problems. If you couldn't fix their behavior before you won him, why could you fix him now?
— Shannon L. Alder
A written constitution is needed to protect values AGAINST prevailing wisdom.
— Antonin Scalia, Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court's Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice
The implicit optimism of the [field service post card] is worth noting—the way it offers no provision for transmitting news like “I have lost my left leg” or “I have been admitted into hospital wounded and do not expect to recover.” Because it provided no way of saying “I am going up the line again,” its users had to improvise. Wilfred Owen had an understanding with his mother that when he used a double line to cross out “I am being sent down to the base,” he meant he was at the front again. Close to brilliant is the way the post card allows one to admit to no state of health between being “quite” well, on the one hand, and, on the other, being so sick that one is in hospital.
— Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
How will we ever tell you apart?" Collins asked, unable to resist the question."It's really quite simple, sir, once you know us," the spokesman assured him. "If he's talking, it's probably George, because Geoff is a quiet lad; if he's dancing a hornpipe, it's Geoff, because hornpipes make me dizzy.""You're George, then?""Yes, sir - the eldest.""By five minutes and fifty-five seconds," added Geoffrey, frowning."Five minutes and fifty-nine seconds," George corrected him calmly.
— Sarah Brazytis, The Apprentices
Before we're born we've all of us been dead for millions of years...but we're always afraid of going back...
— Leonardo Donofrio, Old Country
He is not a great man. None of us are great men. We are just caught in the wave of history.
— Dave Malloy
Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French and Spanish two hundred years ago and the Yankees one hundred years ago. 1948. What a faroff time.
— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
I can't tell you how terribly glad I am that you're going to be all right," George said, rather thickly. "I...I wouldn't know how to act without a twin.
— Sarah Brazytis, The Apprentices
You are in a country that comes and goes, where the people have been mistreated but rarely oppose. Borders have changed by rulers from afar, although sometimes closer than neighbourhoods are. Their religion is sacred and the heavens smile down, but the history they keep will lead you to frown...
— Sean F. Hogan, Painting Angels
History was more than just stories, he reminded himself as the men walked forward with their burdens. It taught lessons as well.
— Conn Iggulden, Conqueror
Vindication is the privilege of the victorious
— Jelle Peters, World 2.0: A History from Enlightenment to Terrorism and Beyond
History belongs to the dead... Discovery belongs to the Living.(Professor Alistair Dawkins)
— Samuel L. Norman, The Adventures of Grant McKingsley and The Secret of the Phoenix
...and of course reconcilliation with England--the country that from the first should have been, given her parallel territorial ambitions, our closest ally--so that some day in the future we can act as one. It remains a mystery to me why that last relationship never worked out. How many more bombs would we have had to drop on their cities before they realized that we were their friends?
— Timur Vermes
No matter how troubled a character's history, romance novels tell us, love can be built upon it, and happily-ever-after can result. What's more, the darker the past, the brighter the future - and the better the read.
— Sarah MacLean
George dutifully dusted the marks from the expensive rug and retired to the kitchen to await a grave and disapproving Collins, wishing with all of his boyish heart that he had applied for the stables. Cleaning stalls had to be beneficial exercise, and surely one must become accustomed to the smells...eventually.
— Sarah Brazytis, The Apprentices
Empowered Women 101: Everyone wants to be a princess, but you weren't the first princess in his life. They scrubbed his floors, washed his workout clothes, picked up his dirty socks and dealt with his issues. Always remember that history leaves a pattern of what to expect. A real woman knows that the bible is a motivator, but the real instruction manual is observing the last woman's struggle.
— Shannon L. Alder
Nothing shines up a halo faster than death Matthew. But funerals are for the living... and revising history... only dilutes the lessons we should learn from it.
— Father Lantom, Daredevil
I’ve spent a lot of time in the States, and the Big Country elates and irritates me simultaneously. It is a big boy child that frequently needs a hug: sometimes needing the prissiness of the world to remind it that its voice is not the only one. Africa is older and wiser, a poor grandmother, a pillaged woman, but still a strong woman. She knows she is a daughter of Earth. There are the sexy aunts of Asia and Europe, and of course, the fussy, once histrionic mother that is Britain. But it was Africa taught America the lesson of liberty.
— Sean J Halford, Stronger Than Lions
Don't deny the past. Remember everything. If you're bitter, be bitter. Cry it out! Scream! Denial is gangrene.
— Joy Kogawa
Only a blind man could have lived through these last years without seeing what was bearing down upon us; so I made myself blind as I could manage. I wanted to believe the worst was behind me, and I found an easy way to make it so. I simply turned my back on what was coming.
— John Wray
The unfortunate Elizabeth Bathori was said to bathe in the blood of young girls in order to preserve her youth and beauty. Apparently more than 600 maidens went down the drain before anyone noticed something amiss at the castle. How very inobservant the neighbors must have been.
— Robert Dunbar, Vortex
For the miserable find comfort in the philosophy that not on them alone has evil fallen.
— Procopius, The Secret History
And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?
— W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Instead of the former divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations, which ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of humanity, modern history has postulated its own aims- the welfare of the French, German, or English people, or, in its highest abstraction, the welfare and civilization of humanity in general, by which is usually meant that of the peoples occupying a small northwesterly portion of a large continent.
— Leo Tolstoy
History is a treadmill turned by rising human numbers. Today GM crops are being marketed as the only means of avoiding mass starvation. They are unlikely to improve the lives of peasant farmers 
—  but they may well enable them to survive in greater numbers.
How were they to square the tremendous wealth they accrued with their image of themselves as frugal and virtuous? Easy: just argue that commerce was itself virtuous. To be rich in corrupt old Europe must be a sign of droneishness
—  but to be rich in fresh young American was the fruit of hard work. The beehive provided Americans with the ideal image for their religion of work.
All of us know history repeats itself, but mighty few of us recognize the repetition until too late.
— Kenneth Roberts, Oliver Wiswell
Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down—or up, I suppose—replacing other people in the process.
— Alexander McCall Smith, The Novel Habits of Happiness
The story of the "bondage" in Egypt, of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises, their rebellion and escape - or emigration - to Asia, has many internal signs of essential truth, mingled, of course, with supernatural interpolations customary in all the historical writings of the ancient East.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
There was something indomitable about Maria – like Britannia. He’d heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said.
— Sara Sheridan, On Starlit Seas
... history - the lamp which illumines national character...
— Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus
When the weakness of human soul conflict with writer's word , It will create self History.
— Yaganesh Derasari
Is your country under great dangers? Light is gone and the darkness is everywhere? You don’t know whom to trust and what to do? Read the history of your country! There you will find out the best map for the way out!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Every Moment can be History of tomorrow but its upon us what to do with this Moment"-Samar Sudha
— Samar Sudha
History most grandiose accomplishments can have the most trivial origin
— Faisal Khosa
our country is poor but our hearts are rich
— Adele Rickerby, The Promise I Kept
We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century", Oliver said. "Who isn't?
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
History fondly remembers those who meet expectations but is written by a few who exceed them
— Faisal Khosa
The educated man, habitually, almost without noticing it, sees the present as something that grows out of a long perspective of centuries. In my the minds of my RAF hearers this perspective simply did not exist. It seemed to me that they did not really believe that we have any reliable knowledge of historic man. But this was often curiously combined with a conviction that we knew a great deal about Prehistoric Man: doubtless because Prehistoric Man is labelled "Science" (which is reliable) whereas Napoleon or Julius Caesar is labelled as "History" (which is not.
— C.S. Lewis
It’s my belief that all of the greatest tales ever told have been told in saloons. It was in such smoky, heathen-filled den of iniquity that I first heard the tale of the Bone Feud. As with all great tales, it was at its core one hundred percent true. In fact, much of it has long been a matter of historical record. But tales grow in the telling, and I therefore must apologize in advance for any inaccuracies, and beg your indulgence for any romanticized embellishments. I have decided to present the story here, just as it was told to me. I find it entirely too rich and too entertaining to alter, simply to curry favor with pedants and historians.
— Wynne McLaughlin, The Bone Feud
When the big German guns at Calais fired on us, we realized, we had been strafed by Spitfires from the RAF during working up exercises for the invasion, accidentally attacked by the USN off Normandy after D-Day and shelled by the British Army in the English Channel. It was about time the enemy took a few shots at us too!"Jack Harold, RCNVR, SignalmanHMCS TRENTONIANChapter 9, White Ensign Flying -The Story of HMCS TRENTONIAN.
— Roger Litwiller, White Ensign Flying: Corvette HMCS Trentonian
When it was all overthe centuries startedto roll by and history was writtenby thosewith no storiesmisery turned into myth and figures of speech played catalyst to happiness
— Bänoo Zan, Songs of Exile
War had bled color from everything, leaving nothing but a storm of gray.
— Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea
He had followed the calendar, the years, time-Bird farted.And it came to me, as though it were riding one moment of the gusting wind, as though bird had had it in him all the time and had passed it to me in that one moment of instant corruption.
— James Welch, Winter in the Blood
History is not like some individual person, which uses men to achieve its ends. History is nothing but the actions of men in pursuit of their ends.
— Karl Marx
In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
[A writer] cannot serve today those who make history
—  he must serve those who are subject to it.
Yet it is also a tonic and an antidote to dullness to be with the Serbs. They possess the irresponsible gaiety that we traditionally connect with the Irish, with whom they have often been compared. Other less convenient sides of the Irish character are also typical in the Serbs, such as a cheerful contempt for punctuality in daily life and a ready willingness, arising clearly from politeness and good nature, to make promises that are not always fulfilled. But perhaps the most pronounced of these similarities is to be found in the songs of Serbia and Ireland. With both peoples the historic songs about the past are songs of sorrow, or noble struggles against overwhelming odds, of failure redeemed by unconquerable resolve. There is nothing strange in this combination of laughing gaiety and profound melancholy. It is often only those who are truly capable of the one emotion who also have the faculty for the other.
— R.G.D. Laffan
The true lessons to be learned from Albert Speer are those that help us to recognize the Albert Speers living amongst us.
— Geetanjali Mukherjee, Will The Real Albert Speer Please Stand Up? The Many Faces of Hitler’s Architect
The past is recorded almost exclusively in the voices of elites and males, in the viewpoints of the wealthy and the powerful, in the visions of the literate and the educated.
— John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant
I have always believed there is great value in studying the flaws of mankind and men —even fictional characters. All of us are flawed. All of us are diminished by some form of prejudice and bias. If a fictional character is to be realistic, he must struggle with imperfections and weaknesses.
— K. Lee Lerner, Government, Politics, and Protest: Essential Primary Sources
Ignoring the evils of our history will only cause them to reoccur.
— R.M. Donaldson
We make history every day, Professor. The question is whether or not you'll be remembered for it.Grant McKingsley
— Samuel L. Norman, The Adventures of Grant McKingsley and The Secret of the Phoenix
The author says that though the Mexican War wound down, the interpretation of it was just beginning.
— Harold Holzer, Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion
The real tragedy was not that Speer chose to side with the Nazis, but that he did not care which side he was on, as long as he benefited from it.
— Geetanjali Mukherjee, Will The Real Albert Speer Please Stand Up? The Many Faces of Hitler’s Architect
Having sent gifts and messengers to the oracle at Delphi, the king of the Lydians sent this message: "[The king] asks you again now whether he shall march against the Persians, and if so, whether he shall join with himself any army of men as allies." The oracle replied that, "if he should march against the Persians he should destroy a great empire."Little did he know which empire he was to destroy. It was to be his own, of course, as Cyrus the Great was ascendant.Quotations from Herodotus' Histories.
— Horodotus
The dark ages are obscure but they were not weird. Magicians there were, to be sure, and miracles. In the flickering firelight of the winter hearth, mead songs were sung of dragons and ring-givers, of fell deeds and famine, of portents and vengeful gods. Strange omens in the sky were thought to foretell evil times. But in a world where the fates seemed to govern by whimsy and caprice, belief in sympathetic magic, superstition and making offerings to spirits was not much more irrational than believing in paper money: trust is an expedient currency. There were charms to ward of dwarfs, water-elf disease and swarms of bees; farmers recited spells against cattle thieves and women knew of potions to make men more - or less - virile. Soothsayers, poets and those who remembered the genealogies of kings were held in high regard. The past was an immense source of wonder and inspiration, of fear and foretelling.
— Max    Adams, The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria
History is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.
— Garth Greenwell
For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust. Now I had found my Mephistopheles. He seemed no less engaging than Goethe's.
— Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich
Elizabeth's whole style of rule was pragmatic and free from preconceptions. It was not that she had no strategic aims, but they were broad and simple. God had entrusted her with three things: a realm to defend; a church to lead in the true way; and a people to protect, both against foreign enemies and against themselves.
— David Loades, Elizabeth I
All times are valuable; the past, present and the future.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Minnie Spotted Wolf from Butte, Montana, was the first Native American to enlist in the Marine Corps Womens' Reserve. Spotted Wolf joined in 1943. She commented that Marine Corps boot camp was "hard, but not that hard.
— Tom Holm
I think it would be more correct to say that mass movements are powerful, and therefore have the potential to do great damage or good. The United States mobilized in a way that could be called a mass movement to fight the Second World War–and so did the Japanese. Were those mass movements good or bad? Both nations felt justified in what they did, and the rights and wrongs depend on which side you are on.
— Jared Taylor
In no issue of foreign policy could her prevarication and indecisiveness be said to have led to disastrous consequences for her country. On the international stage there was no better survivor. At home her achievement can only be judged with hindsight. A combination of good sense and longevity settled the church, and it was no fault of hers that confessional issues became so divisive forty years after her death. She gave her country pride, and set its commercial development on a course that was eventually to be spectacularly successful; for that she deserves more credit than she is usually given.
— David Loades, Elizabeth I
Milkshakes make the world seem less shitty.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
History is just a way of keeping score, but it doesn't have to be who we are.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
It's a date.""It's a cookie.""It's a cookie date.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
Bonding over illegal drugs hadn't magically solved our problems,
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
The tallest slugger touched my forehead, and I ignited like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. Shards of dazzling light rippled under my skin. I was the constellation Grus. The Trifid Nebula. I was the Big Bang, expanding endlessly through time and space forever."I thought I was dying. That I was going to expire on a cold slab, trapped inside an UFO, my body filled with every light that had ever existed. I couldn't imagine a better way to die.
— Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants
He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind
—  to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything.
With Zia's controversial demise in 1988, Jinnah was finally spared the false beard Zia kept pinning on the founder's otherwise clean-shaven face.
— Nadeem Farooq Paracha
The history of our time must be well-captured and documented.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Stop making excuses and start making history.
— A.D. Posey
Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the past chose to leave behind-- for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it's a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper...No, the fault lies with the artists...The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It's them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king...Liars?...or sorcerers? Do they see the bones in the dust of the earth, see the essence of a thing that was, and clothe it in new flesh, so the plodding beast reemerges as a fabulous monster?
— Diana Gabaldon, Dragonfly in Amber
In the years that followed the Harrison campaign, many candidates—from Colonel James 'Young Hickory' Polk in 1844 to Lieutenant John Kerry in 2004—had their 'humble origins' and/or 'war leadership' highlighted in political material. Often coupled with these tactics was a corollary, to create an image of the opposition candidate that was highly negative—from John Adams as a 'monarchist' to John Kerry as a 'flip-flopping, windsurfing elitist.
— Steven A. Seidman, Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History
And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.
— Saul Bellow, Herzog
It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.
— John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant
[C]ontemporary Jesus research is still involved in textual looting, in attacks on the mound of Jesus tradition that do not begin from any overall stratigraphy, do not explain why this or that item was chosen for emphasis over some other one, and give the distinct impression that the researcher knew the result before beginning the search.
— John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant
Just the perfect peace of nothingness. That's what I believed.
— Shaun David Hutchinson
The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion.
— Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin
There were always historians who said [historical Jesus research] can not be done because of historical problems. There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections. And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.
— John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant