c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
He, who fails to acknowledge and appreciate the real courage of our fathers, fails to appreciate the real lessons that the courage of our fathers teaches us today! The courage and the wisdom that propelled our fathers to move unrelentingly in their days must be nothing to us, but, a real reason for us to be more than courageous enough to do the undone distinctively in our days.
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
But Khair did not need such proof of her husband's love for her. Over and over again,James had risked everything for her. Most relationships in life can survive - or not - without being put to any really crucial, fundamental test. It was James's fate for his love to be tested not once, but four times....At each stage he could easily have washed his hands off his teenage lover. Each time he chose to remain true to her.That, not the words of any will, was the evidence she could cling onto.
— William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India
This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children would know, so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on.
— Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
How anyone can vote to support any form of fascism, knowing history, is beyond me - which leads me to draw the conclusion that either the people who voted to support it don't know what they are doing - or that they know exactly what they are doing.
— Christina Engela, All That Remains
As a South African I honestly cannot understand how people can't see South Africa as a unique nation, untied by ties of history, bonds of suffering, victory, struggles, hope - and in more ways than I ever before thought possible - blood.
— Christina Engela, The Time Saving Agency
It doesn't follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it's ancestral. It doesn't follow you can't cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It's as natural and desirable as -- syphilis...
— H.G. Wells, The Holy Terror
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular. And you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings as vast as your own, who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddys in the nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks to loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress making, and knows inside herself that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. Slavery is the same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and describes this world in essential texts. A world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave. Hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave.And when this woman peers back into the generations, all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren, but when she dies, the world, which is really the only world she can really know, ends. For this woman enslavement is not a parable, it is damnation, it is the never ending night, and the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains, whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.
— Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Today, more than 23 million veterans walk among us. Nearly 3 million receive disability compensation, and many more owe their lives to an anonymous corpsman or medic. Millions of Americans and their families are profoundly grateful.
— Scott McGaugh, Battlefield Angels: Saving Lives from Valley Forge to Afghanistan
Apparently some people (who don't know history) seem to think that marriage 'always has been' exclusively between males and females - and that this modern inequality somehow justifies the enforced continuation of this inequality.
— Christina Engela, Loderunner
Having learned to write news, I now distrust newspapers as a source of information, and I am often surprised by historians who take them as primary source for knowing what really happened. I think newspapers should be read for information about how contemporaries construed events, rather than for reliable knowledge of events themselves.
— Robert Darnton, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
One author said "I write because I want to live a footprint in the sands of history.” It's hard to live a footprint in the sands of history when giants are passing through the same sands unless you are one of the giants
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
The pollenless trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds
—  the stagnant air reeked of insecticide.
How will history judge us? Will our tales be sources of inspiration, or wells of caution?
— Yunus D. Saleh, Crisis Management: The Art of Success and Failure
Between the happening of a historical process and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror:  The Calamitous 14th Century
I have seen the tourism market shift over the last ten years with greater value attached to the culture of places, seen people growing sick of plastic phoniness and genuinely wanting to experience places and people that do different things. I see how bored we have grown of ourselves in the modern Western world and how people can fight back and shape their futures using their history as an advantage not an obligation.
— James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District
We will always be black, you and I, even if it means different things in different places. France is built on its own dream, on its collection of bodies, and recall that your very name is drawn from a man who opposed France and its national project of theft by colonization. It is true that our color was not our distinguishing feature there, so much as the Americanness represented in our poor handle on French. And it is true that there is something particular about how the Americans who think they are white regard us—something sexual and obscene. We were not enslaved in France. We are not their particular “problem,” nor their national guilt. We are not their niggers. If there is any comfort in this, it is not the kind that I would encourage you to indulge. Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic. Remember the Roma you saw begging with their children in the street, and the venom with which they were addressed. Remember the Algerian cab driver, speaking openly of his hatred of Paris, then looking at your mother and me and insisting that we were all united under Africa. Remember the rumbling we all felt under the beauty of Paris, as though the city had been built in abeyance of Pompeii. Remember the feeling that the great public gardens, the long lunches, might all be undone by a physics, cousin to our rules and the reckoning of our own country, that we do not fully comprehend.
— Ta Nahesi Coates
I am tired of the sickening sight of the battlefield with its mangled corpses & poor suffering wounded. Victory has no charms for men when purchased at such cost.
— George McClellandin Blue
Although Higgins's men had finally received some badly needed supplies, some of his wounded were becoming critical, and the overall health of his troops continued to ebb. Meanwhile, the price among the 442nd's battalions paid to reach Higgins's men had reached gut-wrenching levels. And for General Dahlquist, panic would supplant his anger and frustration.
— Scott McGaugh, Honor Before Glory
The USA has a long history of radiation damaging workers health.
— Steven Magee
It is not, in the long run, the battles and sieges that signify, but the permanent effect on the human race of the changes they help to bring about.
— John Baddeley
A fallacy has been created that the original empire of the Guptas existed in Magadha while all evidences - epigraphic, numismatic, and the Pauranic - go in favour of establishing the region of Eastern Uttar Pradesh as the original home of the Guptas.
— T. R. Sharma, A Political History of the Imperial Guptas: From Gupta to Skandagupta
I thought of the fate of Descartes’ famous formulation: man as ‘master and proprietor of nature.’ Having brought off miracles in science and technology, this ‘master and proprietor’ is suddenly realizing that he owns nothing and is master neither of nature (it is vanishing, little by little, from the planet), nor of History (it has escaped him), nor of himself (he is led by the irrational forces of his soul). But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master? The planet is moving through the void without any master. There it is, the unbearable lightness of being.
— Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
When it happens and it hits hard, we decide certain things, and realize there's truth in all those dark, lonely days" He had an instantaneous look about him,a glimmer and a glint over those eyes,he knew how the world worked,and took pleasure in its wickedness.He would give a dime or two to those sitting on the street,he would tell them things like:"It won't get any better,"and"Might as well use this to buy your next fix,"and finally"It's better to die high than to live sober,"His suit was pressed nicely, with care and respect,like the kind a corpse wears,he'd say that was his way of honoring the dead,of always being ready for the oncoming train,I liked him,he never wore a fake smileand he was always ready to tell a story about how andwhen"We all wake up alone," he said once,"Oftentimes even when sleeping next to someone, we wake up before them and they are still asleep and suddenly we are awake, and alone."I didn't see him for a few days,a few days later it felt like it'd been weeks,those weeks drifted apart from one another,like leaves on a pond's surface,and became like months.And then I saw him and I asked him where he'd been,he said,"I woke up alone one day, just like any other, and I decided I didn't like it anymore.
— Dave Matthes, Ejaculation: New Poems and Stories
When you look back at that relationship you didn't think you could live without and realize had you stayed in it, you'd be some comfortable loser, sitting on the couch with another comfortable loser, instead of being the dope motherfucker you are today.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
History is about longing and belonging. It is about the need for permanence and the perception of continuity. It concerns the atavistic desire to find deep sources of identity. We live again in the twelfth or in the fifteenth century, finding echoes and resonances of our own time; we may recognise that some things, such as piety and passion, are never lost; we may also conclude that the great general drama of the human spirit is ever fresh and ever renewed. That is why some of the greatest writers have preferred to see English history as dramatic or epic poetry, which is just as capable of expressing the power and movement of history as any prose narrative; it is a form of singing around a fire.
— Peter Ackroyd, Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors
Is there a notion of hope (and of our responsibility to the future) that could be shared by believers and nonbelievers? What can it be based on now? Does an idea of the end, one that does not imply disinterest in the future but rather a constant examination of the errors of the past, have a critical fun
— Umberto Eco, Belief or Nonbelief?
There is wisdom out there that can’t be relayed in musings or sage advice. Like the complexity of life itself, it simply won’t condense. It can only be shown in its entirety. It takes a story.
— Lance Conrad, The Price of Nobility
We are the middle children of history. Born too late to explore earth, born too early to explore space.
— Anonymous
The following is a fictionalized and utterly false account of the events that most definitely did not happen on June 9-10, 1967. And yet, while all the characters in this story are little green men and women running around inside my head, the events that served as inspiration, the historical facts, as it were, must be considered no less than a sibling of the tale contained in these pages: the story I didn't write, but could have written--the book this could have been, but isn't.
— Montague Kobbé, The Night of the Rambler
But all historians, one may say without exception, and in no half-hearted manner, but making this the beginning and end of their labour, have impressed on us that the soundest education and training for a life of active politics is the study of History, and that surest and indeed the only method of learning how to bear bravely the vicissitudes of fortune, is to recall the calamities of others.
— Polybius, The Histories, Vol 1: Books 1-2
We just held each other for warmth. I cannot recall that we even spoke to one another. Such was our shock. That day we learnt a new word—war.
— P.J. Whittlesea, Loreless
The weight of history swings on choices. To understand why people make the choices they do is to understand the whole of history and most of the future.
— Lance Conrad, The Price of Nobility
He indeed who believes that by studying isolated histories he can acquire a fairly just view of history as a whole, is, as it seems to me, much in the case of one, who, after having looked at the dissevered limbs of an animal once alive and beautiful, fancies he has been as good as an eyewitness of the creature itself in all its action and grace.
— Polybius, The Histories, Vol 1: Books 1-2
I'm working on this book on the trial of Socrates. It started out with the idea of the problem of freedom of thought...and expression...I started by spending a year on the English Seventeenth Century Revolutions, and I had a fascinating time. And then I felt I couldn't understand the English Seventeenth Century Revolutions without understanding the Reformation. When I got to the Reformation, I felt that I had to understand the premonitory movements that began in the Middle Ages. When I got there, I felt I had to understand the classical period." (quoted in Andrew Patner, I. F. Stone: A Portrait, p. 21)
— I. F. Stone
Read History ToCreate History
— K Kapoor
History Is The BACKBONEOf FutureLearn and Grow
— K Kapoor
Poppe, once a leading figure at a scientific research institute, found a job as a swimming pool attendant
— Victor Sebestyen, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire
ITS nomimal without all on transfer of regard, that weight of a measure of lines cannot be equal in comparison. The want of privacy is a need of personality not character. Only through devotional love not modernity can you coolect the past, present and future. Timeless is not what you think or hear. Patience is not any big reveal. Never see make how all free?
— Robert Wesley Miller
History doesn't intend to have some particular emotional value, or any particular moral. History doesn't have any intentions at all. It's just a never-ending web of events that can have pretty much any meaning at all. But we, in retrospect, make this web into a story that makes sense. We superimpose onto it a beginning, middle, and end. We decide who the main characters are, the good guys and the bad guys. We decide what the moral of the story is, and how everyone is supposed to feel about it.""But history is facts," I said. "It's not a matter of opinion.""To a certain extent," Dad granted. "The facts matter, to a certain extent. You can't create a story without some facts to base it on. But what 'really happened' doesn't matter. What matters is how we agree to remember it.
— Leila Sales, Past Perfect
History has taught us that the idea of superpower is for a political maniac to design the art of control over other countries.
— Nilantha Ilangamuwa
Don't tell me the sky is the limit - there's footprints on the Moon. - Overheard at a flee market.
— Joseph Shellim
He left not knowing where he was going, he got there not knowing where he was, and he came back not knowing where he had been. But history books will point out Columbus as the person who made the Americas available for exploitation. I guess I can make the same kind of ridiculous claim.
— Herschell Gordon Lewis
The problem with you middle-class gay guys is, you pass for white. You move to the metropolitan gay centres, and you're more or less closeted--"private", you'd call it--when you step outside the ghetto. You assimilate yourselves, and suddenly you've got property to protect and money invested. I ask you, what impelled the militants of the civil rights movement of the sixties? You know what impelled them? They had nothing to lose. That's how they could brave the police dogs and the fire hoses. Even torture and death. Could you have done that?
— Ethan Mordden, How Long Has This Been Going On?
Maybe history wouldn't have to repeat itself if we listened once in awhile.
— Wynne McLaughlin
I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, Practicing History:  Selected Essays
The whole reason I wanted to take Owen to Disney World is that I fear that someday he's going to look through his childhood photo album and wonder why all his vacations with his aunt took pace at places like the McKinley Memorial and Wounded Knee. And yet here we are. Powell's cemetery was just too close to Cinderella's Castle for me to pass up.
— Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation
To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations.
— Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings
The conviction reigns that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists--and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments; one thus recognizes a debt that constantly grows greater, since these forebears never cease, in their continued existence as powerful spirits, to accord the tribe new advantages and new strength.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo
In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, Practicing History:  Selected Essays
The whole reason I wanted to take Owen to Disney World is that I fear that someday he's going to look through his childhood photo album and wonder why all his vacations with his aunt took place at places like the McKinley Memorial and Wounded Knee. And yet here we are. Powell's cemetery was just too close to Cinderella's Castle for me to pass up.
— Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation
If we truly believe in the power of cultural institutions to impact communities and engage authentically with social justice issues, if we believe in museums’ capacity to bring about social change, improve cultural awareness, and even transform the world, than we must also believe that our internal practices have an impact, and must act according to the changes we seek.
— Monica O Montgomery
Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh--one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman
— Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo
We’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive. It’s pretty dense kids who haven’t figured that out by the time they’re 10. ... Most kids can’t afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
He could sense in her the same spirit that ran in his veins. They were people with independent minds. They were not clerks at desks. They preferred to act. Accomplish something. They were rushing to reach the end. Such people need to be left alone. They are used to the darkness, the silence, the waiting. They belong to the same family. That of leopards.
— Mahendra Jakhar, The Butcher of Benares
We look back to times past, and we mass them together, and say in such a year such and such events took place, such wars occupied that year, and during the next there was peace. Yet each year was then divided into weeks, days, minute, and slow-moving seconds, during which there were human minds to note and distinguish them, as now.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca
History is full of examples of men with deep-seated grievances who embraced good causes, in part at least, to settle old scores.
— Carl Bridenbaugh, Jamestown, 1544-1699
For fourteen years Wiliam Walker alias Brown alias Shields alias Swallow alias Waldon alias Todd alias Watson had been a major irritant to British authorities on both sides of the world. To the London police he was an accomplished thief. To the colonial government in Van Diemen's Land, he was a clever and determined escaper; he had stolen one of its vessels and caused much embarrassment by making it back to England not once but twice, one of only a handful of runaways to do so. To these skills of theft and evasion must be added outstanding seamanship, a glib tongue, extraordinary resourcefulness and a capacity for leadership. Among his more admirable attributes his loyalty to his family should also not be forgotten. To the convicts of Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur he was a living legend, tangible proof that escape from the island prison was possible. By any standards, he was a remarkable man...
— Warwick Hirst, The Man Who Stole the Cyprus: A True Story of Escape
She saw and marked the revolutions that had been, and the present seemed to her only a point of rest, from which time was to renew his flight.
— Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca
Pull back the curtain and jump down the rabbit hole.
— Brad Jensen
If the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, Practicing History:  Selected Essays
Fall into the cavern of my mind, and together there, we will dine.
— Brad Jensen
History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.
— Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Should you see the light of your future, within the shadows of your present, The resilience of life dancing over vast deserts of death,Witness if you so shall, the majesty of Creation.The connectedness of All was and always will be. Entanglement? No. We call it Love.” ~ Sargon of Akkad 2345 B.C. Excerpt from Andulairah's upcoming book "The Erunisis Medallion
— Andulairah, Eyes Of The Scarlet Rose
The events might have taken place twelve centuries back, but when I closed my eyes, I could visualize many things. It made me very emotional. Later, when I grew up, I became passionate about history and started detaching it from emotional point of view and became more aware of the facts.
— Sudha Murty, Gently Falls the Bakula
The past was a minefield about which few maps seemed to agree. And why should that surprise me? It's a big place.p. 30
— Danilo Kiš, The Encyclopedia of the Dead
You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You are not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
— James     Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.
— Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe
The pain of what happened next lives in our collective memory. It mauls our souls each day. Yet it must be told. Silence guarantees no healing. It promises that the child's life would be forgotten and that its mission might, one day, be thought significant. Silence is the enemy of history, and history is all we have.
— Daniel Black, The Coming
The bourgeois during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Men always praise antiquity and fault the present, although not always reasonably, and they are partisans of things past such that not only do they celebrate those ages that they know from what historians have preserved of them, but also those that as old men they recall having seen in their youth. And if this opinion of theirs is false, as it is most of the time, I am persuaded that there are various causes that lead them into this deception.
— Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and Other Writings
How queer it was for two lovers to suddenly turn into strangers?
— Diyar Harraz, One Minute to Midnight
therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children.
— Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it’s not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don’t want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.
— I.M. Pei
Mistakes from our collective past are like any other: they require intervention--a remedy--to correct. They don't erase themselves over time.
— Jonathan R. Miller
The past has come apart events are vagueingthe future is inexploitable
— Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy
Was it possible to be homesick for a soul?
— Jessica Dotta, Price of Privilege
If we could learn to look instead of gawking,We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,If only we could act instead of talking,We wouldn't always end up on our arse.This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,The bitch that bore him is in heat again.
— Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
History, for better or worse, is 'us' on a grand scale ─ full of secrets, beauty, fear, longing, and stifled love. Without history, our lives would not be complete, and we could not be, in the best sense, fully 'human.
— Boria Sax
Isn’t that the fantasy? If I go back in time, knowing what people back then didn’t know, then I can change history! But history made you what you are. And it’s bigger than any one man.
— Dexter Palmer, Version Control
Corrupt and incompetent police officers have a long history of being protected by their colleagues, police internal affairs and the government.
— Steven Magee
Conspiracy theory, like causality, works fantastically well as an explanatory model but only if you use it backwards. The fact that we cannot predict much about tomorrow strongly indicates that most of the explanations we develop about how something happened yesterday have (like history in general) a high bullshit content.
— Peter J. Carroll, Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magick
Having lost and regained her freedom in the most extraordinary circumstances over the course of her remarkable lifetime, few could have set a higher price on the value of liberty. And yet, as she was well aware, it was only through the fundamental principles of justice that her liberty had finally been secured.
— Wendy Moore, Wedlock
The memory was unpleasant; he'd taken an instant disliking to the man. Compounding Peter's distrust, Chase was wearing a necktie, the most incomprehensible article of clothing in the history of the world.
— Justin Cronin, The City of Mirrors
Part of our work as faithful Christians is to learn how to discern when, and by what means, to resist authority.
— The Liberty Book
I know it's the belief that women should never show daring in front of men. Never be bold when men hesitate. I know flight is not the answer
—  even to save our lives.
Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land, stole Sutter's land, Guerrero' s land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, and possession was ownership.The Mexicans were weak and fed. They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land.
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Nations need to constantly reaffirm their historical roots to maintain their political ideals. Motion pictures were one of the media used by nations to accommplish this task. The question one must ask is: Did the colonial films made faithfully represent the period in our nation's history?
— John P. Harty Jr., The Cinematic Challenge: Filming Colonial America
The colonial films of the golden age of Hollywood were a clear proclamation of the Consensus historians' interpretation of the facts. These motion pictures encouraged audiences to believe that our nation could overcome all obstacles to its growth and defend itself against any future foreign aggression.
— John P. Harty Jr., The Cinematic Challenge: Filming Colonial America
Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings.
— Daron Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
I had often thought about people who lived through strange and compelling times — World War II, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement. These were periods that shaped people in some indelible way. I wondered how this moment would define us. I had never before believed that there was anything special about the era I was growing up in.
— Aditi Khorana, Mirror in the Sky
Sweeping out of the inward positive reality, there is to be a positive manifestation externally. It is not just that we are dead to certain things, but we are to love God, we are to be alive to Him, we are to be in communion with Him, in this present moment of history. And we are to love men, to be alive to men as men, and to be in communication on a true personal level with men, in this present moment of history.
— Francis A. Schaeffer
When my grandchildren ask me what I did in the '42 movement [Quit India Movement] I say - "I waited for it.
— R.P. Noronha, A Tale Told By An Idiot
God long ago defined what it means to do evil. It is for violations of His standards that we are to be afraid.
— The Liberty Book
True freedom allows us to do all the good we can under God’s law.
— The Liberty Book
Jesus not only preached liberty, but has the authority to direct history toward its final victory.
— The Liberty Book
Where faith increases, liberty follows.-The Liberty Book
— The Liberty Book
In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.
— Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Understanding anyone begins with the person's family history and the culture he or she is a part of.
— Pat Brown, The Murder of Cleopatra: History's Greatest Cold Case
The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well.
— Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
There was no time to lose, no time to waste in rest or play. The life of the earth comes up with a rush in the springtime.
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farmer Boy
The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative —not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury —strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power
They inhabited a lost world of splendour and brutality, a world dominated by religious change, in which there were few saints.
— Alison Weir, Six Tudor Queens: Writing a New Story
So they all went away from the little log house. The shutters were over the windows, so the little house could not see them go. It stayed there inside the log fence, behind the two big oak trees that in the summertime had made green roofs for Mary and Laura to play under. And that was the last of the little house.
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
— Will Durant, The Lessons of History
Arthur managed to speak to his grandmother [Queen Eleanor of England], demanding that she evacuate the castle with all her possessions and then go peaceably wherever she wished, for he wanted to show nothing but honour to her person. The Queen replied that she would not leave it, but if he behaved as a courtly gentlemen, he would quit this place, for he would find plenty of castles to attack other than the one she was in.
— Alison Weir, Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life
The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.
— Isaac Asimov, The Naked Sun
The snug log house looked just as it always had. It did not seem to know they were going away.
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods
So they all went away from the little log house. The shutters were over the windows, so the little house could not see them go. It stayed there inside the log fence, behind the two big oak trees that in the summertime had made green roofs for Mary and Laura to play under. And that was the last of the little house
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie
One day in the woods he met an Indian. They stood in the wet, cold woods and looked at each other, and they could not talk because they did not know each other's words
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie
You can fill a glass full to the brim with milk, and fill another glass of the same size brim full of popcorn, and then you can put all the popcorn kernel by kernel into the milk, and the milk will not run over. You cannot do this with bread. Popcorn and milk are the only two things that will go into the same place.
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farmer Boy
One day in the woods he met an Indian. They stood in the wet, cold woods and looked at each other, and they could not talk because they did not know each other's words.
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie
How could a society produce such masters and such monsters?
— Meg Wiviott, Paper Hearts
Cattle did not have to be led to water. They came eagerly to the trough and drank while Almanzo pumped, then they hurried back to the warm barns, and each went to its own place. Each cow turned into her own stall and put her head between her own stanchions. They never made a mistake.Whether this was because they had more sense than horses, or because they had so little sense that they did everything by habit, Father did not know.
— Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farmer Boy
Until quite recently women's histories were largely overlooked but in the wake of feminism there has been increasing interest in retrieving them.
— Alison Weir, Six Tudor Queens: Writing a New Story
The ultimate goal of this book is to present fragments from an epic about an animal that evolved, started talking, started talking about the fact that it was talking, and then paused briefly before asking itself how it started talking in the first place.
— Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language
The greatest act of domestic terrorism in the history of the USA is currently in process and the culprits are the energy, electrical, electronics and wireless radiation industries.
— Steven Magee
Clearly, naming the major figures in the tradition had become a tradition in itself.
— Gregory Woods
[V]irtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
[I]ndeed, one hears, in early Christian theology, as many echoes of Persian dualism as of Hebrew Puritanism or Greek philosophy.
— Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage
Freaks become norms, and norms become extinct. Monster by monster, evolution advanced
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
Natures and features last until the grave
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
Time and time over it is the ones who try a little too hard to be innovative rebels - and for the sheer glory of being considered innovative rebels - who then turn out not quite as innovative or as rebellious as they would like to think they are.
— Criss Jami
Policemen are often confronted with situations which baffle them at first. A certain crime scene may seem meaningless, but they have to derive some meaning out of it. They have to connect the dots, find the links, delve into its history, look for evidence, come up with a zillion theories and arrive at truth. The thing is, truth is always stranger than fiction.
— Mahendra Jakhar, The Butcher of Benares
Wasplike with their long slender hulls, these were ships not seen in these waters before. They approached in a line, each flying a large American flag. To the hundreds of onlookers by now gathered on shore, many also carrying American flags, it would be a sight they would never forget and into which they read great meaning. These were the descendants of the colonials returning now at Britain's hour of need....
— Erik Larson, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
The world became informed about the extent of the catastrophe and the losses by the big powers eclipsed the numbers of Estonias who perished. When counting Hitler's victims there was no interest in Stalin's victims. Stalin belonged among the victors. Since victors are not judged, a half century later it is still ignored that the number of Stalin's victims exceeds Hitler's (Applebaum 2003). In addition, only rarely does one hear references to the fact that Soviet union0s criminal acts have not been expiated.
— Rutt Hinrikus, Carrying Linda's Stones: An Anthology of Estonian Women's Life Stories
The best we can do is take the history we have and deal with it.
— Christopher L. Bennett
To make matters worse, Jackson placed great value on regurgitating every last detail of the assigned texts. When, in response to Jackson's question 'What are the three simple machines?' a cadet answered, 'The inclined plane, the lever, and the wheel,' Jackson replied, 'No, sir. The lever, the wheel, and the inclined plane.
— S.C. Gwynne
The record must be hurled like a stone under history's wheel in order to stop it.
— Gustawa Jarecka
I believe history is a circle, made by men who don't learn from their mistakes.
— Edward Hogan, Daylight Saving
Like the New Orleans tradition that preceded it, and the Swing Era offerings that followed it, Chicago jazz was not just the music of a time and place, but also a timeless style of performance - and for its exponents, very much a way of life - one that continues to reverberate to this day in the works of countless Dixieland and traditional jazz bands around the world. For many listeners, the Chicago style remains nothing less than the quintessential sound of jazz.
— Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz
The French by their nature had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored.
— Antal Szerb, The Queen's Necklace
They think they’re runnin’ the country but all they’re doin’ is writin’ the reports.” From Homesteader
—  Finding Sharon by D.M. McGowan
It is not the business of a Queen to be human.
— Antal Szerb, The Queen's Necklace
If you spent time thinking about the future, you wouldn't be a true adventurer. An adventure is something that happens from one moment to the next; in which there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. Everything else is just petty bourgeois.
— Antal Szerb, The Queen's Necklace
History narrates stories about great men from the past,write your story now and make history
— Mohammed Sekouty
Everyone has a story with coca-cola people like Wayne Dyer even and people like Alan Rickman and many other people, so... they are dead so you can take it Coca-Cola is part of the history!
— Deyth Banger
I don't like regressing - I move beyond. Life belongs to the future and I believe in creating History rather than visiting and revisiting the past.
— Amit Abraham
Is it better to have bronze than copper and tin separately? Is this the marker of some historic advance?
— Claudia Piñeiro, Las grietas de Jara
Not being interested in other cultures is the normal state of mankind.
— Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe
History is, above all else, the creation and recording of that heritage; progress is its increasing abundance, preservation, transmission, and use. To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man's follies and crimes, but also as an encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.
— will and Ariel Durant
You are a stone, thrown upon a lake. But the ripples you create will never make you still.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
This city is like no other city in the world. It is brilliant but it is bloated, and I've never called it home
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
The turnip cannot thrive in the tulips patch of soil.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
The rules of this house are written in water. I must either sink or swim.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
From history books you should at best believe just the punctuation. The rest is uncertain, incomplete, distorted, exaggerated or even fabricated.
— A.J. Beirens, Gesels van een imaginaire god
Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won't get bogged down in blood and marrow again?
— Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Penitent
Because, Petronella - it's something in his soul. It's something in his soul and you can't get it out.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
All we can do if we're lucky is stich up the mistakes other people make.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
That may be. But to decide that I was never going to live as a proper woman was not your choice to make.' 'What do you mean a proper woman?' 'A proper woman marries - she has children -' 'Then what does that make me? Am I not a proper woman? Last time I looked I certainly was.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
Love your children, for they are the seeds that will make this city bloom.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
Words are water in this city. One drop of rumour could drown us.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
Take care, take care. This city thrives! It's money gives you wings to soar. But it is a yoke on your shoulders and you would do well to take note of the bruise around your neck.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
Believe it or don't believe it, Madame. But my feet are tired too. Bloody tired. Like a dead man's.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
We're nothing more than prisoners to your desire.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
The ink was secret nectar, for Marin isn't married.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain.
— Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
It is important to leave behind a rich and memorable legacy than just accumulated history!
— Sanjai Velayudhan, Dance of the Spirits: A Novel
There are horizons through the brickwork, you wait and see.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
Even if yesterday existed, today is just real, not a fantasy like the past.
— Michael Bassey Johnson, Master of Maxims
What was once, is no longer.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
The night darkens, the stars unfriendly, the cold a knife upon her neck - but Nella waits, until she can no longer difference between Johannes and the darkness that carries him away.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
Neighbours watching neighbours, twisting ropes to bind us all.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
From little seeds great flowers grow.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
the ballerina on perfected toeSpins to the axis of a fortitudeThat is the sum of all her yesterdays.
— Djuna Barnes
I feel younger than eighteen but burdened as a eighty-year-old.
— Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist
Any religion-based state has a mission to limit the minds of its people, to fight the developments of history and logic, and to dumb down its citizens. It’s important to stand in the way of such a mentality, to deny it from continuing its mission to murder the souls of its people, killing them deep within while they are still alive and breathing.
— Raif Badawi, 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think
States that are built on a religious foundation limit their own people in a circle of faith and fear.
— Raif Badawi, 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think
The principle must always rule that ideas are not born of other ideas, philosophies of other philosophies; they are a continually renewed expression 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 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks
Those who oppose equality, compassion and social justice have been on the wrong side of history time and time again.
— Laurence Overmire
The word 'algebra' derives from Al-Khawarizmi's book title "al-jabr", meaning "completion"; balancing both sides to find a solution
— Firas Alkhateeb, Lost Islamic History: Reclaiming Muslim Civilisation from the Past