c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I grew up thinking the only scriptures on earth were those inspired by the Hebrew prophets of the Old Testament, the words and letters of Jesus and his apostles, and the scriptures of the Restoration. But how could the God I believed was the loving God of all the earth not speak somehow to everyone else? For years I wrestled with this idea. Having now read the Chinese classics, certainly Confucius, but others as well, I believe I have found the scriptural infusion God gave the Chinese nation. Mencius is my favorite, I must admit, and I do not hesitate to call what he bestowed upon the world scripture--some of the most optimistic, holy writing the world has.
— S. Michael Wilcox, 10 Great Souls I Want to Meet in Heaven
It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.
— Neel Burton
And if I was bewildered through those decades, totally bewildered, so was the country I came from. The majority, what was the phrase? 'Condemn utterly what is happening, this barbarity.' But that's all we did. Condemn. And march. But not often enough.
— Josephine Hart, The truth about love
When boys called Bob and Bono would bring their own wild-rhythm celebration and the world would fall down in worshipful hallelujahs as it again acknowledged Ireland's capacity to create missionaries. So what if they were "the boys in the band"? They sang from a pulpit, an enormous pulpit looking down on a congregation that would knock your eyes out. A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that had produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we're teachers, missionaries.
— Josephine Hart, The truth about love
It’s a Small World After All….Nothing, other than perhaps our universe, started in a vacuum and neither did the discovery of the Americas, which of course included the island of Cuba. To find a starting point, a little background regarding the Iberian Peninsula is helpful, since that is where it all began. Why did Columbus want to sail for parts unknown? What was going through his mind when he turned his small fleet of three ships in a westerly direction and headed towards the edge of the world? Surely, he didn’t have a death wish, so what was it that he knew that the rest of the 15th century world didn’t?
— Hank Bracker, The Exciting Story of Cuba: Understanding Cuba's Present by Knowing Its Past
Thanksgiving at Sea"Most of us will enjoy Thanksgiving Day ashore in the comfort of our home but some will be at sea, because they are working on some boat, barge or ship. Others will be out on the brine by design as passengers, now considered guests on cruise ships. What came to mind however, was my father who was a ship’s cook in the 1920’s, and the stories he shared with us. Best as I can tell, the year must have been somewhere around 1924 when his ship was in Shanghai, which is now China’s biggest city. Tied up at a rickety dock on the Huangpu River, he could see the famed waterfront promenade lined with the now famed colonial-style buildings. The time had come to butcher one of the penned goats, brought along for this expressed purpose. Being on a German freighter, Thanksgiving Day had no special meaning but stew made of goat meat was always a treat for the crew. Fast forward to the present… almost every single cruise ship at sea or in a foreign port, will celebrate Thanksgiving Day with a marvelous turkey dinner, plus joyful entertainment. Whether you celebrate the day with your significant other, or take along an entire gang of friends and family; Thanksgiving Day at sea will be far from the lonely day it once was. Holidays, including Thanksgiving are always especially festive at sea.
— Hank Bracker, The Exciting Story of Cuba: Understanding Cuba's Present by Knowing Its Past
Zoological Parks South of Florida“Cuba has several zoos, the largest of which are in Havana and Santiago de Cuba. The Havana National Zoo is dedicated to going beyond the mere display of animals and attempts to maintain a more natural habitat, supporting and promoting breeding programs for various species with follow-up scientific research programs.” From page 500, “The Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning author Captain Hank Bracker. Available at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, BooksAMillon.com and other Independent book outlets.
— Hank Bracker, The Exciting Story of Cuba: Understanding Cuba's Present by Knowing Its Past
José Martí is recognized as the George Washington of Cuba or perhaps better yet, as Simon Bolivar, the liberator of South America. He was born in Havana on January 28, 1853, to Spanish parents. His mother, Leonor Pérez Cabrera, was a native of the Canary Islands and his father, Mariano Martí Navarro, came from Valencia. Families were big then, and it was not long before José had seven sisters. While still very young his parents took him to Spain, but it was just two years later that they returned to Santa Clara where his father worked as a prison guard. His parents enrolled José at a local public school. In September of 1867, Martí signed up at the Escuela Profesional de Pintura y Escultura de La Habana, an art school for painting and sculpture in Havana."Read more about José Martí in the “Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning author Captain Hank Bracker. This book is available at Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com or Independent Book stores everywhere.
— Hank Bracker, The Exciting Story of Cuba: Understanding Cuba's Present by Knowing Its Past
However much one lacks piety, the atmosphere in a graveyard encourages quiet reflection.
— C. J. Sansom
Fascinated by the great symbols of the collective history, I use them as an alphabet to communicate.
— Nuno Roque
We had traveled far and long to get here but were still the same still-born, unreconstructed people who had once met on this landscape that began somewhere not too far south of the south and ended all the way up in the northernmost extremes of the north, and every soul begotten upon this land was a bastard child of that interminable human equation: colonizer and colony, slave and master, rapist and victim, and any pledge to loyalty and patriotism was an oath to both parts of this equation—we were the seconds obliviously turned up on the old, unregenerate battlefield, here to fight in history’s redundant, never-ending duel, always carrying someone else’s sword and flag in the name of the myth.
— John M. Keller, Abracadabrantesque
The Spartans do not ask how many but where they are.
— Agis II of Sparta
To do no evil is good, to intend none better.
— Claudius, Roman Emperor
An unjust peace is better than a just war.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
I know one thing, that I know nothing.
— Socrates
A person may know things by somebody else's experience but a person will always learn things by his own personal experience.
— Raj Kiran Atagaraha, The Golden Temple
Consider our body as a temple and our heart as a place where God or the Guru resides. If we open up our hearts like the gates of the Golden Temple, if we don’t fight with each other in the name of religion, if we treat every individual equally then the God inside us will be happy. When the God inside us becomes happy, we will become happy and when we will become happy then the temple will look all the more beautiful.
— Raj Kiran Atagaraha, The Golden Temple
We are weaving her-story into reality.Unweaving the limiting his-stories.Creating our-story.Reaching beyond religion and patriarchy and capitalism and so-called democracy.Into new ways of being and seeing.We are the bridge between worldsWe are the ones we have been waiting for.
— Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman
People who are not historians sometimes think of history as the facts about the past. Historians are supposed to know otherwise. The facts are there, to be sure, but they are infinite in number and speak, if at all, in conflicting, often unintelligible, voices. It is the task of the historian to reach back into this incoherent babel of facts, choose the ones that are important, and figure out what it is they say.
— Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past
We often fear that the Revolution needed is too big for what we can give.Too much change is required inside, outside.And we are too small.But all that is required is that you step into the truth of your life. And speak it, write it, paint it, dance it.That you shine your light on your truth, for the world to see.And as hundreds, then thousands, then millions do this – each sparking the courage of yet more – Suddenly we have a world alight with truth.
— Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman
Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America—which means that at some level you’ve made peace with its rather ugly past.
— Vijay Iyer
Technology is often portrayed as an objective measure of development, and its advancement as something that can be examined outside of politics. But the history of technology, particularly military technology, has been deeply inflected by nationalist sentiment.
— Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
Our outsideness, after all, is a major part of what makes us different from the direct participants in history and enables us, as historians, to render the past intelligible and meaningful in ways that simply are not available to those immediately in- volved. In other words, outsideness, whether that of Americans addressing the Chi- nese past or of historians in general addressing the past in general, does not just distort; it also illuminates. This means that, as I said earlier, our central task is to find ways of exploiting our outsideness that maximize the illumination and mini- mize the distortion.
— Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past
Is it really true... that our aim as historians is in some sense to recapture past reality, “to retrieve the truth about the past?” If so, what do “past reality” and “the truth about the past” mean? How does the historian’s understanding of “reality” and “truth” differ—as most surely it does—from that of the direct participant? And what implications does this difference have for what we do as historians? It is not likely that questions of this sort will ever be finally answered. Yet clearly we must keep asking such questions if we are to maintain the highest levels of honesty and self-awareness concerning our work as historians.
— Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past
Where the Depression years had aroused a deep sense of concern over how American wealth was distributed and American society structured, the successive crises of the 1960s and early 1970s, by highlighting the contradiction between the destructive capability of American technology and the moral opaqueness of those Americans who had ultimate control over its use, raised questions about the very course of “modern” historical development. After Vietnam, there could be no more easy assumptions about the goodness of American power, no more easy equating of being “modern” with being “civilized.
— Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past
Indebtedness among historians is a peculiar thing, however. We don’t simply, in mechanical fashion, inherit a body of knowledge, add something to it, and pass it on. We also question, test, and shake here and there the intellectual scaffolding surrounding our predecessors’ work, in the full, ironic knowledge that someone else is going to come along and give the scaffolding surrounding our own work a good shake, too, that no historian, in short, is ever permitted the final word.
— Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past
She replaced her wardrobe with marvels of the season bought from boutiques of the Palais-Royal and rue de la Chaussee-d'Antin. Outfits for a ball detailed in the fashion pages of the January 1839 edition of Paris Elegant describe dresses of pale pink crépe garnished with lace and velvet roses and accessorized with white gloves, silk stockings, and white cashmere or taffeta shawls. In the spring of that year, misty tulle bonnets came into fashion worn with capes of Alencon lace - “little masterpieces of lightness and freshness.“Her bed was her stage, raised on a platform and curtained with sumptuous pink silk drapes. The adjoining cabinet de toilette was also a courtesan’s natural habitat, its dressing table a jumble of lace, bows, ribbons, embossed vases, crystal bottles of scents and lotions, brushes and combs of ivory and silver.She indulged her sweet tooth with cakes from Rollet the patissier, glaceed fruit from Boissier, and on one occasion sent for twelve biscuits, macaroons, and maraschino liqueur.
— Julie Kavanagh, The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis
I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argue, was American treatment of the Opium War, the objective importance of which was not nearly so great as we—and an almost unanimous corps of Chinese historians—have imagined.
— Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past
I hope… that we are making China more interesting and less exotic to our Europeanist colleagues. Soon it may no longer suffice for historians of Europe to make mere polite bows in the direction of China
—  they will have to become more familiar with Chinese history on a serious level in order to carry on their work in European history effectively.
...the modern bias in contemporary Western scholarship (which has spread to the rest of the world as well) insists upon focusing all attention on the formation of the modern world and ‘‘modernity.’’ By directing attention to a time period rather than to a region, Western scholars can place the West at the center of any discussion, and subordinate backward Asia to Western history, without explicitly condemning Asian cultures and polities or arguing for a narrowly Eurocentric view of the world. Nevertheless, modern history is effectively a racist pursuit that not only elevates white Westerners above all others, but also actively denigrates Asian history.
— Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
Perhaps the strangest manifestation of the Eurocentric approach to the history of military technology is ... the attempt to discern fundamental cultural roots in the distant past that have resulted in the perceived current Western dominance of the world. This essentialism attempts to contrast ancient Greek logic and philosophy with the less rationally minded philosophies of the non-West. Modern science and technology, in this view, is a simple jump from ancient Greece to early modern Europe.
— Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
Technology has become the West’s main prop to its claims of inherent superiority over the non-West, and the reason why the non-West should adopt Western culture. If advanced technology is particular to Western culture, then it is only by Westernizing that the non-West can obtain it. This argument collapses if Western technology can be adopted in isolation from the broader culture, or if other cultures can generate significant technology independently.
— Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
... the very appearance of the word ‘‘oriental’’ as a serious geographic or cultural term triggers alarm bells for any American academic. The late Edward Said’s Orientalism argued that the word ‘‘oriental’’ is a fundamentally pejorative term for certain parts of the non-Western world, not only indicating that they are inferior but also justifying Western colonization or domination of them.
— Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
China failed to maintain its technological lead, and a similar failure throughout Asia to take advantage of the early exposure to that head start transformed precocity into a false dawn. Perversely, Asian improvements and adaptations of current (twentieth- to twenty-first-century) Western-developed technology are taken as further signs of lack of creativity.
— Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb
It is a truism, easily forgotten, that the West, in its modern phase, has not stood still. Also easily forgotten is the fact that "the West" is a relative concept only. Without an "East" or a "non-West" to compare it with, it would quite simply not exist; there would be no word for it in our vocabulary. If the concept of the West did not exist, of course, the spatial variations within the geographical area now subsumed under "the West" would loom larger in our minds. The difference between France and America might seem just as great as those between China and the West.
— Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past
It is not cynical to admit the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added or removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and visions and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice! Do you know why the history of the Tower is in such turmoil? Because too many powerful men are fighting for the pen, fighting to write their story over our dead bodies. They know what is at stake: immortality, the character of civilization, and influence beyond the ages. They are fighting to see who gets to mislead our grandchildren.
— Josiah Bancroft, Arm of the Sphinx
As historians, our aim is to do our utmost to understand and elucidate past reality. At the same time, in pursuit of this goal, we must use ordering concepts that by definition inevitably introduce an element of distortion. I believe that our task as historians is to choose concepts that combine a maximum of explanatory power with a minimum of distortional effect.
— Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past
In the end, history proved the Jews correct. Across time and place, memory lives on the tenacity of a people’s resolve never to forget—not just with words—but with an endless stream of concrete actions rushing every day, every hour, every minute, every second.
— Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
Flights to Santiago de CubaSantiago de Cuba has the Antonio Maceo Airport (MUCU/SCU), which was home to the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. The airport is essentially a turboprop hub, however it can also accommodate mid-sized jet aircraft. There are about twenty international flights each week, but most arrivals are by domestic airlines. The eastern location and the international status of MUCU/SCU has spurred the interest of foreign airlines as a promising future destination. All in all, Cuba now has ten international airports, capable of serving long range flights. “Santiago de Cuba has the Antonio Maceo Airport (MUCU/SCU), which was home to the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. The airport is essentially a turboprop hub, however it can also accommodate mid-sized jet aircraft. There are about twenty international flights each week, but most arrivals are by domestic airlines. The eastern location and the international status of MUCU/SCU has spurred the interest of foreign airlines as a promising future destination. All in all, Cuba now has ten international airports, capable of serving long range flights.
— Hank Bracker, The Exciting Story of Cuba: Understanding Cuba's Present by Knowing Its Past
If you don't know history, you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree.
— Michael Chrichton
It's nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it's the weirdos who care the most.
— Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Without trust there's no cooperation. And without cooperation there's no progress. History stops.
— Rick Yancey, The Last Star
What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is string and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.
— Julian Barnes
Tom smiled at the Fleming — a bright, friendly smile — and bobbed his head courteously. That confused the jolt-head. Then, by way of making conversation while his confederates gained their positions, he said, "I suppose someone must have told you — your mother, perhaps, or your father, though I doubt you ever knew him — that you're an idle-headed canker. A rank pustule? No? Not even an irksome, crook-pated, pathetical nit?"The Fleming, his face as red as hot steel, roared and swung a fist like a blacksmith's hammer.
— Anna Castle, Murder by Misrule
Tom." Mrs. Sprye's tone was severe. "I expect you to look after this boy, not encourage him to go about brawling in the street. In broad daylight!"Tom was stung. "It's nigh impossible to brawl in the dark, Mrs. Sprye. And look—" He put his hands on Trumpet's shoulders and turned him full circle. "Scarcely a scratch on him. A bit dirty, true, but I believe that Pygmies can be washed.
— Anna Castle, Murder by Misrule
Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.
— Milan Kundera, The Joke
Ιη m¥ books, ł'm †ђ3 best; I just need some time тσ prove it ιη ¥øûЯ history books.
— Ufuoma Apoki
Before Lind's experiments, scurvy was not clearly defined as a disease.The term was used as a catchphrase to include all manner of nautical ailments.
— Stephen R. Bown, Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail
The book was an instrument of both repression and liberation
— Anders Rydell, The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe's Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance
To gain an understanding of the mind leads on to an appreciation of what it means to be human.
— Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science
I run my finger along the crease of the envelope, feel the weight of history inside. Wherever I'm going next, these are coming with me.
— Gayle Forman, Just One Year
Music is the building block for things yet to come.
— Imani Nettles
Marx wrote that 'History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.' This was witty but far from true. History is never repeated, but it borrows, steals, echoes and commandeers the past to create a hybrid, something unique out of the ingredients of past and present.
— Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613-1918
History is for everyone, but the memories of it is for those who experienced it.
— ME :)
Physical development was alleged to assist spiritual and intellectual development, while also helping safeguard boys from the 'solitary and sexual sin' of masturbation.
— Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870���1920
Their message will never be decoded… because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.
— Milan Kundera, The Joke
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience…
— E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
It is probably safe to say that in strongly hierarchical societies the only people to whom something approaching nationalist sentiments can be attributed in pre-modern times is the ruling elite, and then only at times.
— Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran: Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism
The Annual Register for 1763 tabulated the casualty list for British sailors in the Seven Years' War with France. Out of 184,899 men raised or rounded up for the war, 133, 708 died from disease, primarily scurvy, while only 1,512 were killed in action.
— Stephen R. Brown
You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on – into the dustbin of history!
— Leon Trotksy
I can tell you that events were incremental, that the unbelievable became the believable and, ultimately, the normal.
— Ralph  Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other
It is OK if you don't fit in, history only remembers the exceptional.
— Pradeepa Pandiyan
There are moments in time that can never be understood, at least not fully. Times we only read about in history books, or see in movies, barely a re-creation of the truth. But it takes more than reading about it or putting on the costumes to understand what history really means.
— Leslie Tall Manning, Upside Down in a Laura Ingalls Town
Kindness is not something you are born with
—  it's a way in which you choose to be.
To forget is to render the pages of history as entirely blank, and the lessons of history as never taught.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
When I was an undergraduate we were told that history had ended, and we all believed it. When the Berlin Wall fell, what history was made of was over. No more Cold War. No more wars. And yet here it was, and is and all of it falling apart. Endings. Worlds dissolving. Weather systems, baking systems, the careful plans of municipal gardeners. Families, hearts, lives.
— Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk
The mechanism of the clock was enclosed in a box resembling a large cupboard, but I was disappointed with the workings. They were much smaller than I had anticipated. The clock was worked by heavy weights suspended on long cables. My father picked up a handle like the crank handle of a car and wound them up. There were two of them. One to work the hands, the other controlling the hammer which struck out the hours on a large bell. Then the mousetraps were set, Not to catch mice, but to control the lighting. Previously my father had to make a special trip each evening to switch on the lights of the clock, returning near midnight to switch them off. To obviate this he invented a method of light control which may have been unique. Two switches, one for switching on and the other for switching off were used. They were fixed on the inside wall of the tower. A mousetrap mounted near each switch was so arranged that when the trap sprung, the arc traversed by the closing trap enabled the switch to be flicked on or off as required. Adjustable sleeves were set along the the cables for required times. The sleeves on the descending cables tripped the mouse traps which actuated the switches.
— William  Perry, The End of an Era: Life in Old Eaglehawk and Bendigo
We never knew Jim's surname but to us, as youngsters, he was "Jim Bool the Fool". It may not have been respectful but Jim Bool was the most outrageous liar you could ever meet. If it was test cricket time Jim would tell, in all seriousness, of how he played for Australia, of the centuries he had made and he wickets he had taken. In the football season he would describe the days when he had captained Melbourne. He had won King's Prizes for rifle shooting, the gun championship at Monte Carlo and when Melbourne Cup time came around we were treated to a vivid account of how he had won the Cup in his jockeying days.
— William  Perry, The End of an Era: Life in Old Eaglehawk and Bendigo
Mr Arblaster first built his factory in 1884. It burnt down the following year. It was rebuilt in 1886 and was destroyed by an explosion during 1887 when eight lives were lost. The factory was once more rebuilt but blew up in 1888 when a lad was killed. It was built again, but on 11 December 1890 was once more wrecked by an explosion.
— William  Perry, The End of an Era: Life in Old Eaglehawk and Bendigo
He was the most contradictory of men. A champion of extending freedom and democracy to even the poorest of whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who rescued an Indian orphan on a battlefield to raise in his home, Jackson was responsible for the removal of Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. An enemy of Eastern financial elites and a relentless opponent of the Bank of the United States, which he believed to be a bastion of corruption, Jackson also promised to die, if necessary, to preserve the power and prestige of the central government. Like us and our America, Jackson and his America achieved great things while committing grievous sins.
— Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House
Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
We should, however, not forget that ethnic cleansing, especially of nonwhite Muslim peoples, has old historical roots in Russia. John Dunlop, for instance, reminds us that “in May 1856, Count Kiselev, minister of state domains, informed officials in the Crimea that Alexander [tsar Alexander II] was interested in ‘cleansing’ (Kiselev used the verb oshishchat’) Crimea of as many Tatars as possible.” That the tsarist empire was interested in annexing foreign lands, but not in annexing foreign peoples, was expressed by the famous remark of a tsarist minister that “Russia needs Armenia, but she has no need of Armenians.” [192]
— Marcel H. Van Herpen, Putin's Wars: The Rise of Russia's New Imperialism
Whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famine, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment - they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. So the history of household life isn't just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves ... but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has ever happened. Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up.
— Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.[On British railway dining cars]
— Simon Bradley, The Railways: Nation, Network and People
History can be rewritten, but at what cost?
— Lauren Kate, Rapture
I thought those were others. Soon, I was to learn that they were us.
— Ralph  Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other
In 1904, the newly created Los Angeles Department of Water and Power issued its first public report. 'The time has come,' it said, 'when we shall have to supplement the supply from another source.' With that simple statement, William Mulholland was about to become a modern Moses. But instead of leading his people to the promised land, he would cleave the desert and lead the promised waters to them.
— Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Japan surprised almost everyone but Marty with their attack on Pearl Harbor,
— Karen Wardamasky Bobrow, Do Svidanya Dad: Tracing the Story of an American Family Trapped in the USSR
The legacy I leave will be unimaginably enhanced by the legacies I received. Therefore, I must be wise enough to embrace the history of those who have gone before me so that I can shape the future of those who will go ahead of me.
— Craig D. Lounsbrough
Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed’s coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France, stranded by his neighbour’s death in the midst of a policy so advanced, so brilliant and so intricate that it should at last batter England to the ground, and be damned to the best legs in Europe—Francis, bereft of these sweet pleasures, dwindled and died likewise.
— Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings
Cooking gave us not just the meal but also the occasion: the practice of eating together at an appointed time and place. This was something new under the sun, for the forager of raw food would have likely fed himself on the go and alone, like all the other animals. (Or, come to think of it, like the industrial eaters we've more recently become, grazing at gas stations and eating by ourselves whenever and wherever.) But sitting down to common meals, making eye contact, sharing food, and exercising self-restraint all served to civilize us.
— Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
DID YOU KNOW that the UNBELIEVING, the FEARFUL and LIARS are no better than the MURDERERS, the SORCERERS and the IDOLATERS? In fact, they will all go to hell. The Bible says, "But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death." (Revelation 21:8). The Bible did not say those wearing jewelry and trouser will go to hell. Don't allow the religious and legalistic people to divert your heart from the real issues. Stop playing with sin. No sin is greater than another. All lead to hell fire.
— Daniel Friday Danzor
In the history of man, there has been and always will be more horses' asses than horses.
— Jeffrey Fry
Moment by moment, in life's winter life frozeEchoing a history of blues, a milestone rose
— Sandeep N Tripathi
Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.
— Marcus Aurelius
Stupid Wars are easy to start but hard to end.
— Ed Strosser, Stupid Wars: A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions
War is a lie
— Claude Beccai, Camille 1944: If you are a bird, do not forget how to fly
History is us squinting into the past, mistaking millions of tiny vibrations in all directions for unified, unidirectional movements by entire civilizations.
— Joseph Fink, Mostly Void, Partially Stars
Outside, under the marquee of the hotel, he stood a moment as he did each night beneath the marquee of the Hotel Hyperion, while he decided what direction to take, what to do. And suddenly, realizing it was not the Hotel Hyperion, that the circumstances were quite different, he felt loneliness spring up like a dark forest all around him. The odd thing was, he felt no impulse to hurry after her, to find her somehow. What would he have to offer her except the history of weakness, loneliness, and inadequacy, the decline and fall of himself? He himself was the core of the loneliness around him, and its core was inadequacy. He was inadequate even in love.
— Patricia Highsmith, Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of ancestors' by the records of history?
— Marco Tulliio Cicerone
The ghost stories were fascinating, made even more so by the personal connection between the living and the long-departed. The ghosts seemed content to be there. The truly amazing part of the story, however, was how happy the owner and staff of the inn were with their spirits. It made me want to stay there… and perhaps never leave.
— James Caskey, St. Augustine Ghosts: Hauntings in the Ancient City
Descending south into St. Augustine’s Historic District along A1A, visitors are immediately confronted by an edifice which serves as a stark reminder that the city was originally founded as a military outpost, deep in hostile territory. Jutting up like a molar from the defensive teeth of the Ancient City is the forbidding fortress of Castillo de San Marcos, a coquina fortification which has served many roles it its nearly three hundred fifty year history.
— James Caskey
St. Augustine is not only the oldest continuously-occupied European settlement on the American continent, it is also perhaps the most haunted city in the United States. Seemingly every spot in this city has some ghostly hidden history, right below the surface. Just by strolling through the historic streets you can hear the whispers of the long-dead.
— James Caskey, St. Augustine Ghosts: Hauntings in the Ancient City
The economists have us well along the way of the greatest mass extinction event in human history.
— Steven Magee
Winner goes with the flow, History Maker against the flow
— Kjiva, Murder: the gangster rhymes
Our ancestors lived in groups of no more than a few hundred people, and those on the other side of a river or mountain range might as well have been living in a separate world. We developed ethical principles to help us to deal with problems within our community, not to help those outside it. The harms that it was considered wrong to cause were generally clear and well defined. We developed inhibitions against, and emotional responses to, such actions, and these instinctive or emotional reactions still form the basis for much of our moral thinking.
— Peter Singer, Practical Ethics
The story of humanity can be written as the struggle to acknowledge all human beings as human beings.
— J.S.B. Morse, Everyone Agrees: Book I: Words, Ideas, and a Universal Morality
A historian cannot pick and choose his facts
—  he must deal with all the evidence.
Places of genius challenge us. They are difficult. They do not earn their place in history with ethnic restaurants or street festivals, but by provoking us, making demands of us. Crazy, unrealistic, beautiful demands.
— Eric Weiner, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley
It was after our breakfast that I was told to go up along with the parlour maid and serve the family breakfast. I was very nervous, but the parlour maid told me not to worry. So up I went, shaking in my boots, and into the breakfast room where the sideboard was laden with kidneys and rice and bacon and all sorts of delicious things. There were just four people at the table: three elderly men and a woman with a green parrot on her shoulder. Now, the thing about the parrot was that it had messed all down her shoulder and all down the front of her dress and she wasn't in the least bothered. She just smiled into the distance and every now and then fed the bird something from her hand.
— Rose Plummer, The Maid's Tale
This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom - we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.
— Yuval Noah Harari
we refer to the Middle Ages as ages of faith; a time in which men believed a heavenly Jerusalem above the sky much as they believed an earthly Sion beyond the sea; when the whole of their thought was of a piece with their theology...those were days when a thoughtful soul here or there could realize some unity of mental vision. The fact should be admitted, however we regard it - whether as the stultifying tyranny of dogma or as an enviable single-mindedness; an ideal too easily realized, no doubt, in a plentiful dearth of empirical knowledge, and yet establishing a standard after which perplexed modernity may strive.
— Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis
Hold on to your periwigs, I'm going to start you off with a whirlwind tour of the history of Stuart Britain; a time that encompassed the vast majority of the seventeenth century and the first fourteen years of the eighteenth.
— Andrea Zuvich, A Year in the Life of Stuart Britain
Hold onto your periwigs, I'm going to start you off with a whirlwind tour of the history of Stuart Britain; a time that encompassed the vast majority of the seventeenth century and the first fourteen years of the eighteenth.
— Andrea Zuvich, A Year in the Life of Stuart Britain
History is Storytelling.
— Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
The electrical grounding system is the largest radio frequency (RF) radiation antenna system ever constructed in the history of mankind.
— Steven Magee
But it's not really Chinese, is it?'Logan was thoughtful for a moment. "I don't know. I guess you'd say it's really not if you look back thousands of years. But I don't think that way. Lots of things start out not Chinese and end up that way.
— Ken Liu, All the Flavors
The dancing sickness took place during the latter part of the fifteenth century. Bubonic plague--the black death--decimated Europe near the end of the fourteenth. Whooping cough near the end of the seventeenth, and the first known outbreaks of influenza near the end of the nineteenth. We've become so used to the idea of the flu--it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn't it?--that no one but the historians seem to know that a hundred years ago it didn't exist.
— Stephen King, The Stand
The time for princes and tsars and holy madmen was gone.In its place came a world of war and revolution, of tanks andtelephones, murder and assassination.
— Marcus Sedgwick, Blood Red, Snow White
A nation that forgets its past has no future
— Sir Winston Churchill
Studying history is for tourists - polite, tidy people with clean desks and clean consciences. Making history is for people willing to get their hands dirty, to make mistake and lie when necessary, so that someday historians can sit quietly at their desks and act shocked.
— Robert Ferrigno, Heart of the Assassin
A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn't notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn't have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction.
— Elias Canetti, The Human Province
The wealth of the imperial countries is our wealth too. On the universal plane this affirmation, you may be sure, should on no account be taken to signify that we feel ourselves affected by the creations of Western arts or techniques. For in a very concrete way Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries:Latin America, China, and Africa. From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries toward that same Europe diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialized in the Negro slave trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves. So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude. Quite the contrary; we say to ourselves: "It's a just reparation which will be paid to us.
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like a paleontologist.
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Unfortunately, humans have a long history of trying to fix their engineering mistakes with more engineering mistakes!
— Steven Magee
We gathered up the kids and sat up on the hill. We had no time to get our chickens and no time to get our horses out of the corral. The water came in and smacked against the corral and broke the horses' legs. The drowned, and the chickens drowned. We sat on the hill and we cried. These are the stories we tell about the river," said [Ladona] Brave Bull Allard. The granddaughter of Chief Brave Bull, she told her story at a Missouri River symposium in Bismark, North Dakota, in the fall of 2003.Before The Flood, her Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lived in a Garden of Eden, where nature provided all their needs. "In the summer, we would plant huge gardens because the land was fertile," she recalled. We had all our potatoes and squash. We canned all the berries that grew along the river. Now we don't have the plants and the medicine they used to make.
— Bill Lambrecht, Big Muddy Blues: True Tales and Twisted Politics Along Lewis and Clark's Missouri River
If the food supply runs out, try trapping or hunting animals. For most people, this won't be easy. If you can't catch any animals, it's time to throw a Donner party.
— Andrew Shaffer, How to Survive a Sharknado and Other Unnatural Disasters: Fight Back When Monsters and Mother Nature Attack
Keep an open mind but a skeptical eye.
— Carmine Savastano, Two Princes And A King: A Concise Review of Three Political Assassinations
You and I have to rejoice that we have not to answer for our fathers’ crimes, neither shall we do right to charge them one to another. We can only regret it, and flee from it, and from henceforth, let peace and righteousness be written upon our hearts and hands forever.
— William Apess, Eulogy on King Philip
We want trumpets that sound like thunder, and men to act as though they were going to war with those corrupt and degrading principles that rob one of all rights, merely because he is ignorant, and of a little different color. Let us have principles that will give every one his due; and then shall wars cease, and the weary find rest.
— William Apess, Eulogy on King Philip