c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Waves crack with wicked fury against me ship's hull while ocean currents rage as the full moon rises o're the sea."  (Cutthroat's Omen: A Crimson Dawn)
— John Phillips
But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture? He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.That, said the Dean, is the Parthenon.- So it is.- I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions.- All right, then. - Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. - Shall I tell you what’s rotten about it?- It’s the Parthenon! - said the Dean.- Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!The ruler struck the glass over the picture.- Look,- said Roark. - The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?
— Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
That as people age, accumulate more and more private experiences, their sense of history tightens, narrows, becomes more personal? So that to the extent that they remember events of social importance, they remember only for example 'where they were' when such-and-such occurred. Et cetera et cetera. Objective events and data become naturally more and more subjectively colored.
— David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System
History, if it has taught us anything at all, has taught us that the strange ideas we deride today will one day be our celebrated truths.
— Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol
There would be no Lenin without Rasputin.
— Robert K. Massie
Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.
— Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation
Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories.
— Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.
— Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
There are no lessons to be learned from the past. This is the first thing I learned from it. There is nothing back then that there isn't here now. There is nothing here now - nothing that matters - that wasn't back then. What matters. Are you a good person? Do you have any love in your heart? What would you do in a given circumstance? It all comes down to something like that.
— Tom Lichtenberg, Time Zone
For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses--an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of this missionary zeal, contributing to our overbearing (yet not entirely unwarranted) sense of our country as an inherently helpful force in the world. And, as with the apostle Paul, the notion that strangers want our help is sometimes a delusion.
— Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes
The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.
— Laura Lippman, In a Strange City
We are all living history, and it’s hard to say now what will be important in the future. One thing’s certain, though: if we throw it away, it’s gone.
— Marilyn Johnson, This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All
Not everyone believed in marriage then. To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too - that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.
— Paula McLain, The Paris Wife
In 1922 everything changed again. The Eskimo pie was invented; James Joyce's Ulysses was printed in Paris; snow fell on Mauna Loa, Hawaii; Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the New York Yankees; Eugene O'Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Frederick Douglass's home was dedicated as a national shrine; former heavyweight champion of the world Jack Johnson invented the wrench...
— Bernice L. McFadden, Glorious
What was the point of living through history if you didn't record it?
— Tatjana Soli, The Lotus Eaters
Sometimes in studying Ramanujan's work, [George Andrews] said at another time, "I have wondered how much Ramanujan could have done if he had had MACSYMA or SCRATCHPAD or some other symbolic algebra package.
— Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener.
— Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Sound drums and trumpets! Farewell sour annoy! For here, I hope, begins our lasting joy.
— William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 3
History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.
— Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum
It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.
— Karl Marx
History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.
— Clarence Darrow
There are ghosts of yourself scattered everywhere,Whispers of a moment suspended in time,Where every life that you've brushed up againstNow lives with a piece of you trapped in their mind.
— Erin Hanson
Four rehabs meant a fifth was somewhere down the road.
— John Grisham, The Testament
Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.
— Isabel Allende, Zorro
Are you aware that humanity is just a blip? Not even a blip. Just a fraction of a fraction of what the universe has been and will become? Talk about perspective. I figure I can't feel so entirely stupid about saying what I said because, first of all, it's true. And second of all, there will be no remnant of me or my stupidity. No fossil or geographical shift that can document, really, even the most important historical human beings, let alone my paltry admissions.
— Meg Mullins, The Rug Merchant
History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.
— Idries Shah, Reflections
To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.
— Jack Lynch, The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park
I am convinced that human history has not yet begun, that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.
— Bartolomeo Vanzetti
Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.
— James Robertson, And the Land Lay Still
If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how noble your intentions, you have taken one step toward the destruction of the world.
— Robert Bringhurst, The Tree Of Meaning: Thirteen Talks
Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime!
— Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden
It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
— Samuel Butler
Grandmother's knee is a wonderful place to learn about the Bible, ghosts, and even Santa Claus, but a mighty poor place to learn about history.
— L.B. Taylor Jr.
Mark Twain once said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
— Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do
In the end I believe the essential spirit that animates those places animates me. If that spirit is God, then I found God...If that spirit is life, then I found life...If that spirit is awe, then I found awe. Part of me suspects it's all three...all I had to do to discover that spirit and the resulting feeling of humility and appreciation was not to look or listen or taste or feel. All I had to do was remember, for what I was looking for I somehow already knew.
— Bruce Feiler
Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probably that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books.
— Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as Stage
Bosnia's war had its visual hallmarks. Parks that were turned into cemeteries, refugee families piled onto horse-drawn carts, stop-or-die checkpoints with mines across the road. The most hideous hallmark of all was the blackened patch of ground in the center of town. It always meant the same thing, a destroyed mosque. The goal of ethnic cleansing was not simply to get rid of Muslims; it was to destroy all traces that they had ever lived in Bosnia. The goal was to kill history. If you want to do that, then you must rip out history's heart, which in the case of Bosnia's Muslim community meant the destruction of its mosques. Once that was done, you could reinvent the past in whatever distorted form you wanted, like Frankenstein.p. 85
— Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War
I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.
— Sara Sheridan
You can't be neutral on a moving train.
— Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times
The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources--because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.
— Lyndon B. Johnson
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
— John Berger, Ways of Seeing
The mind is a powerful thing. It can take you through walls.
— Denis Avey, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz: A True Story of World War II
There was no Disney World then, just rows of orange trees. Millions of them. Stretching for miles And somewhere near the middle was the Citrus Tower, which the tourists climbed to see even more orange trees. Every month an eighty-year-old couple became lost in the groves, driving up and down identical rows for days until they were spotted by helicopter or another tourist on top of the Citrus Tower. They had lived on nothing but oranges and come out of the trees drilled on vitamin C and checked into the honeymoon suite at the nearest bed-and-breakfast."The Miami Seaquarium put in a monorail and rockets started going off at Cape Canaveral, making us feel like we were on the frontier of the future. Disney bought up everything north of Lake Okeechobee, preparing to shove the future down our throats sideways."Things evolved rapidly! Missile silos in Cuba. Bales on the beach. Alligators are almost extinct and then they aren't. Juntas hanging shingles in Boca Raton. Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo skinny-dipping off Key Biscayne. We atone for atrocities against the INdians by playing Bingo. Shark fetuses in formaldehyde jars, roadside gecko farms, tourists waddling around waffle houses like flocks of flightless birds. And before we know it, we have The New Florida, underplanned, overbuilt and ripe for a killer hurricane that'll knock that giant geodesic dome at Epcot down the trunpike like a golf ball, a solid one-wood by Buckminster Fuller."I am the native and this is my home. Faded pastels, and Spanish tiles constantly slipping off roofs, shattering on the sidewalk. Dogs with mange and skateboard punks with mange roaming through yards, knocking over garbage cans. Lunatics wandering the streets at night, talking about spaceships. Bail bondsmen wake me up at three A.M. looking for the last tenant. Next door, a mail-order bride is clubbed by a smelly ma in a mechanic's shirt. Cats violently mate under my windows and rats break-dance in the drop ceiling. And I'm lying in bed with a broken air conditioner, sweating and sipping lemonade through a straw. And I'm thinking, geez, this used to be a great state."You wanna come to Florida? You get a discount on theme-park tickets and find out you just bough a time share. Or maybe you end up at Cape Canaveral, sitting in a field for a week as a space shuttle launch is canceled six times. And suddenly vacation is over, you have to catch a plane, and you see the shuttle take off on TV at the airport. But you keep coming back, year after year, and one day you find you're eighty years old driving through an orange grove.
— Tim Dorsey, Florida Roadkill
In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors and three signs. MEN was neatly stenciled over one door, LADIES over the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the brush-covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily, green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable... There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts... If I ever give you the idea that 1958's all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream.
— Stephen King, 11/22/63
‎I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still if there wasn't greatness in me maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others even in the most irritating others.
— David Benioff, City of Thieves
History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
— Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
To understand history,' Chacko said, 'we have to go inside and listen to what they're saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.
— Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
History's a bitch when you're in the middle of it.
— Jay Asher
It was an odd situation. For a century and a half, men got rid of their own hair, which was perfectly comfortable, and instead covered their heads with something foreign and uncomfortable. Very often it was actually their own hair made into a wig. People who couldn't afford wigs tried to make their hair look like a wig.
— Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life
As you travel around medieval England you will come across a sport described by some contemporaries as 'abominable ... more common, undignified and worthless than any other game, rarely ending but with some loss, accident or disadvantage to the players themselves'. This is football.
— Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.
— Christopher Henry Dawson, Enquiries Into Religion and Culture
Your history is not your future.
— Jessa Slade, Forged Of Shadows
History doesn't remember gardens.…You forgot the wise administrators, those who kept the peace, those who brought prosperity. You needn’t feel embarrassed, though. So did history.
— Andrew Ashling
Tell me, before you call us servants, who served whom? And who, I wonder, in your generations, will immortalize you?
— Peter Shaffer, Amadeus
And in that history you're trying to connect to something that once was yours - to something purer, better, something that you lost or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you knew.
— Sebastian Faulks, Engleby
Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story.
— Graham Hancock
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 ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Bluebeard
Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.
— Ernst Jünger
It’s bad enough . . . when a country gets colonized, but when the people do as well! That’s the end, really, that’s the end.
— Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
The songs of our ancestors are also the songs of our children
— Philip Carr-Gomm
After all, history is a type of fantasy. For all the primary source research, in the end, the past world the historian builds is as weird and remote from our own as Middle Earth or Narnia, yet oddly familiar.
— Ysabeau S. Wilce, Flora Fyrdraaca
‎We must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude...If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements...if we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.
— Thomas Jefferson
Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.
— Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
History is an angel being blown backwards into the future
— Laurie  Anderson
Unjust social orders do no fall merely by appeals to the consciences of the oppressor, though such appeals may be an important element; history teaches us that they fall because a large enough number of people organize a movement powerful enough to push them down. Rarely do such revolutions emerge in a neat and morally pristine process.
— Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.
— Cory Doctorow, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present
They never let you live it down. One little mistake!"- Nero
— Robert Lynn Asprin, Little Myth Marker
As never before, he understood the vitality of tradition, the dignity of the worship of what had existed before one's own self had come into being. There was no shame in awe; there was exaltation. (“Cafe Endless: Spring Rain”)
— Nancy Holder, Love in Vein: Twenty Original Tales of Vampiric Erotica
The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.
— Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil
A man who don't know history, he don't know anything.
— Edward Johnston
Acts 16:9 is the meddler's motto, simultaneously selfless and self-serving, generous but stuck-up. Into every generation of Americans is born a new crop of buttinskys sniffing out the latest Macedonia that may or may not want their help.
— Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes
Today, I don't believe in destiny. But I do believe in history...There's nothing more powerful than history...
— Brad Meltzer, The Inner Circle
Their lives were precarious and they knew it. They were trying their best to fit themselves into a country which would never quite accept them, and to make themselves acceptable in a part of the world where their intrusion was resented in the vain hope that thus their establishments might endure ... The Orient remained strange and hostile. Unfamiliar diseases abounded. No one could be trusted. There was never security or peace for long. In any alley-way an assassin might be lurking, sent down from the Old Man of the Mountain. At any moment the lord might have to rise from his couch to ride out against enemy raiders. At any moment his lady might find herself in charge of the defence of her castle. At any moment the festivities might be interrupted by the sound of the infidel mangonels pounding against the walls. Life was merry, but it was short; and when the crisis came there was no lack of gallantry among the lords and ladies of Outremer. They had tasted with relish the gracious things of life; and they faced their doom with pride and resolution.
— Steven Runciman
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
— Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
If everyone knows so much about it, why do they need to make a documentary?
— Brigid Pasulka, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True
Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.
— Milan Kundera, The Joke
While Leonidas was preparing to make his stand, a Persian envoy arrived. The envoy explained to Leonidas the futility of trying to resist the advance of the Great King's army and demanded that the Greeks lay down their arms and submit to the might of Persia. Leonidas laconically told Xerxes, "Come and get them.
— Plutarch
The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties
—  all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.
War is sometimes described as long periods of boredom punctuated by short moments of excitement. History is often similar, if rather safer.
— John H. Arnold
Jefferson feared that Hamilton had plans radically at odds with the Constitution. As he saw it, Hamilton wanted to warp the federal government out of constitutional shape, converting it into a copy of the British government, built on debt, corruption, and influence. Hamilton's goal, Jefferson charged, was to ally the rich and well born with the government at the people's expense, creating a corrupt aristocracy leagued with the government against the people and destroying the virtue that was the basis of republican government. Only a republic could preserve liberty, Jefferson insisted, and only virtue among the people could preserve a republic.
— R.B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson
It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible. And then use them against each other.
— Geoff Ryman, Was
The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.
— Dan C. Quayle
Most cowgirls are natural storytellers, their art honed by years of practice. . . . It serves as entertainment; it also preserves the humor and value of a unique way of life.
— Teresa Jordan, Cowgirls: Women of the American West
In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.
— Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear
In history, as elsewhere, fools rush in, and the angels may perhaps be forgiven if rather than tread in those treacherous paths they tread upon the fools instead.
— G.R. Elton
Destiny doesn't always come when it's convenient or when you think it should. It comes when you're ready, whether you know it or not.
— Kelly Thompson, The Girl Who Would Be King
Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatized by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.The man feels a great fraternity with those birds. He feels he carries, like them, a shredded inheritance, and he is too concussed to pass anything on.
— Rana Dasgupta, Solo
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
— Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
History's got no bows on it, only frayed ends of ribbons and knots that can't be untied.
— Orson Scott Card, Alvin Journeyman
That was the nature of history, of course: notional, partial, unknowable, a record made by the victors.
— Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden
So a dog's value came from the training AND the breeding. And by breeding, Edgar supposed he meant both the bloodlines - the particular dogs in their ancestry - and all the information in the file cabinets. Because the files, with their photographs, measurements, notes, charts, cross-references, and scores, told the STORY of the dog - what a MEANT as his father put it.
— David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
The trouble is, we are incurable sentimentalists. We insist on makin over historical characters to suit our preconceived notions of what they should be, chipping, sandpapering, and polishing each personality until it assumes what we consider the proper contour and color.
— Nancy Byrd Turner, The Mother of Washington
Some people like danger and adventure, some like to be free of civilization, and some like to live by their wits. It was those special people who headed west.
— Joy Hakim, Making Thirteen Colonies: 1600-1740 A History of US
I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history—Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.
— Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.
— Karl Marx
I've heard it said before that those who don't learn from the past are bound to repeat it, and I just don't know what I think about that. I figure I don't have too much use for it. The past will just weigh on you if you spend too much time remembering it.
— Wiley Cash, A Land More Kind Than Home
History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy
— Zbigniew Brzeziński
For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look maximally ridiculous. If one could be maximally uncomfortable as well, the triumph was all the greater.
— Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life
For some, excavating the past isn’t an adventure, it’s more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an open wound.
— Raquel Cepeda, Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina
The past is a reality that exists just beyond our reach.
— Joanna Denny, Anne Boleyn: A New Life of England's Tragic Queen
History is like a constantly changing tree.
— David Irving
Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
— Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun
...Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.
— Laura Lippman, Hardly Knew Her
Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in xbox where it can't hurt anyone.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White
She (historian Barbara Tuchman) draws on skepticism, not cynicism, leaving the reader not so much outraged by human ability as amused and saddened by human folly.
— Robert K. Massie
Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.
— Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World
No one cared what St. Louis thought, although the city got a wink for pluck.
— Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
People forget history nowadays, he lamented, that is what the ego does, making one the prisoner of one's inflated present, ignoring the humble past one has lived.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
History remembers only the names of the conquerors. There are no pages devoted to the scruples of the losers.
— Manjul Bajaj, Come, Before Evening Falls
History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.
— China Miéville, Railsea
Since the early beginning of history, India has been the Klondyke of the world
— Virchand Gandhi
If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance.
— Herbert Butterfield
When you study history, you're really studying yourself. Every bit of history I've uncovered about my own family has some remnant in myself.
— John Sedgwick
The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.
— Steven Heighton
Of that time, there is still much we do not know.
— Tom Bissell, Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation
Nostalgia is the intimate refuge of every man and every woman in a world seemingly gone mad.
— John Larkins
Mrs. Friedman lived in a happy snow globe of AP History.
— Harlan Coben, Seconds Away
The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.
— Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
A lot of the nonsense was the innocent result of playfulness on the part of the founding fathers of the nation of Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless eduction, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well. But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crime. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:1492The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.Here was another piece of nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom of human beings everywhere else. There were pictures and statues of this supposed imaginary beacon for children to see. It was sort of ice-cream cone on fire. It looked like this:[image]Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.Color was everything.Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulphur. They touched the seemingly listless powder with fire, and it turned violently into gas. This gas blew projectiles out of metal tubes at terrific velocities. The projectiles cut through meat and bone very easily; so the pirates could wreck the wiring or the bellows or the plumbing of a stubborn human being, even when he was far, far away.The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
Justice is a relative concept in all ages. The fourteenth century is no exception.
— Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
Discover how to visit the past and bring yesterday's stories into our lives today
— Gillian Hovell, 'Visiting the Past'
You must train harder than the enemy who is trying to kill you. You will get all the rest you need in the grave.
— Leon Degrelle
Aside from battles, the history of nations seemed to consist of nothing but powerless old poops like myself, heavily medicated and vaguely beloved in the long ago, coming to kiss the boots of young psychopaths.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!
History is the long struggle of man, by exercise of his reason, to understand his environment and to act upon it. But the modern period has broadened the struggle in a revolutionary way. Man now seeks to understand, and act on, not only his environment, but himself; and this has added, so to speak, a new dimension to reason and a new dimension to history.
— Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?
The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
— Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
...early medieval Ireland sounds like a somewhat crazed Wisconsin, in which every dairy farm is an armed camp at perpetual war with its neighbors, and every farmer claims he is a king.
— David Willis McCullough, Wars of the Irish Kings: A Thousand Years of Struggle, from the Age of Myth through the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I
When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our “fault.” But it is undeniably our inheritance.
— Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.
— Julian Barnes, England, England
Under every roof, a story, just as behind every brow, a history
— Gregory Maguire, Son of a Witch
Such elusive puzzles recall the historian's basic dilemma: the absence of evidence does not always signify evidence of absence. In the end, we will likely never know.
— Howard Markel, An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine
These,” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.
— Aldous Huxley
The longer a life, the challenge is not the distance between destinations, but the difficulty of travelling light. My soul’s a portmanteau packed full, one half filled with what was, the other with what is, what should be.
— Jamie A. Hughes
I am the keeper of my husband's history.
— Deirdre-Elizabeth Parker, The Fugitive's Doctor
In 1914, Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian imperial heir, was shot and killed by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. Do you know the motive behind the act?It was in retaliation for the subjugation of the Sebs in Austria.It was not.Franz Ferdinand had stated his intention to introduce reforms favorable to the Serbs in his empire. Had he survived to ascend the throne, he would have made a revolution unnecessary. In plain terms, he was killed because he was going to give the rebels what they were shouting for. They needed a despot in the palace in order to seize it.What's good for reform is bad for the reformers
— Loren D. Estleman, Gas City
It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.
— John Lewis Gaddis
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II to protect our way of life and to help liberate those who had fallen under the Axis occupation. The country rallied to produce one of the largest war efforts in history. Young men volunteered to join the Armed Forces, while others were drafted. Women went to work in factories and took military jobs. Everyone collected their used cooking grease and metals to be used for munitions. They rationed gas and groceries. Factories now were producing airplanes, weapons, and military vehicles. They all wanted to do their part. And they did, turning America into a war machine. The nation was in full support to help our boys win the war and come home quickly.Grandpa wanted to do his part too.
— Kara Martinelli, My Very Dearest Anna
Reading. The erotics of reading for me -- its moment of trembling pleasure -- lie in those times when I realise that what I am reading is just what I was about to say. It is a moment of jealousy and disappointment, as if the occasion had been stolen from me, but it is a moment of excitement, too -- because I think I would like to try and say it better, because now the monologue in my mind has become dialogue. My immediate impulse is to write something, anything, notes to tell me the significance of what I have read, an appreciative letter to the author, the first sentences in a preface to a book that will never be written. Th archives of my readings are monumentally high. I can never let these erotic moments go. They are the paper trail of my mind.
— Greg Dening, Readings/Writings
It's been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don't learn, or can't remember it, are doomed to repeat it.
— Steve Berry, The Charlemagne Pursuit
Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.
— Nick Joaquín, Culture and History
Washington once advised his adopted grandson that where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent. For there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.
— Ron Chernow
Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.
— Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding indefatigable and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time into its own future. I liked it.
— Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram
Read no history--nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
— Benjamin Disraeli
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
— Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
If we cannot agree on what was important yesterday, what more on events that happened a hundred or three hundred years ago? The point here is that history is open ended and we cannot be sure about the past. So why study history? Because it teaches us to see the connections between events. Knowing how and why a certain event happened is helpful because in many cases people separated by time and place can sometimes be in similar situations. They can be mentally contemporaneous without knowing it. History gives us hindsight.
— Ambeth R. Ocampo, Meaning and History: The Rizal Lectures
Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.
— Gary Snyder, The Old Ways
Sometimes history cleaves and for one helpless moment stands still like the pause when the ax splits a log and the two halves rest on end waiting to fall.
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
Augustine recast how people should view history, that history was not the story of the rise and fall of empires because those are human things. Those are the city of man. Rather, true history should be the history of salvation, of man moving toward God. It's a focus that takes the light off of this world and shines it much more brightly on the next world.
— Thomas F. Madden, From Jesus to Christianity: A History of the Early Church
The importance of setting a date, as in choosing a colour, is a matter of selection. Orange may be seen equally well as 'the decline and fall of red' or 'the rise and triumph of yellow'.
— Donald Thomas, Villains' Paradise: A History of Britain's Underworld
…little people like me have to keep the true story alive. That way, when the revolution ends, and people come looking for the history, we can say, ‘Here it is – we kept it for you.
— Mauriel Joslyn
We are entitled to violate history, provided that it results in handsome offspring.
— Alexandre Dumas
And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it, Heaven." Washington himself could be a hard driving businessman, yet he found the rapacity of many vendors unconscionable. As he told George Mason, he thought it the intent of the speculators, various tribes of money makers and stock jobbers of all denominations, to continue the war for their own private emolument, without considering that their avarice and thirst for gain must plunge everything in one common ruin.
— Ron Chernow
We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers.
— Angela Y. Davis
Learn from history or you're doomed to repeat it.
— Jesse Ventura
We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way
—  he is like Mohammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic
It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world.
— Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story
Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.
— Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Lady Placida smiled. “History seldom takes note of serendipity when it records events. And from what I have heard, I suspect an argument could be made that you very much did earn the title.”“Many women have earned titles, Your Grace. It doesn't seem to have been a factor in whether or not they actually received them.”Lady Placida laughed. “True enough. But perhaps that is beginning to change.” She offered her hands. “It is a distinct pleasure to meet you, Steadholder.
— Jim Butcher, Academ's Fury
The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.
— Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.
News is only the first rough draft of history.
— Alan Barth
We need a new, deeper appreciation of the ethnic histories of the American people, not a reduction of American history to ethnic histories.
— Steven C. Rockefeller, Multiculturalism
Great persons, like great empires, leave their mark on history.
— Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia
History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.
— Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation