Historical Quotes - Page 13

• Sooner I'd try to change history than turn political, than try convincing others to write letters or to vote or to march or to do something they didn't already feel like doing.

  Richard Bach

  Change, Writing, Political

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• Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Mean, Results, Great Results

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Barbara L. Packer, Joseph Slater, Douglas Emory Wilson (2003). “The Conduct of Life”, p.136, Harvard University Press

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• Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult.

  Nicolas Bentley

  Learning, Lessons, Easy

  Nicolas Bentley (1959). “A Choice of Ornaments”

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• The more that one studies the history of the building of the American nation, the clearer it becomes that it may be justly described as a laboratory experiment in understanding and in solving the world problems of tomorrow.

  Nicholas Murray Butler

  America, Understanding, World

  "The Age of the Americas: An Address Delivered at the Parrish Memorial Art Museum, Southampton, Long Island, September 6, 1942".

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• For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.

  Aristotle

  Philosophical, Serious, Attention

  'Poetics' ch. 9, 1451b

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• On the eve of this great adventure I send my best wishes to every soldier in the Allied team.
  To us is given the honour of striking a blow for freedom which will live in history; and in the better days that lie ahead men will speak with pride of our doings.

  Bernard Law Montgomery

  Lying, Pride, Men

  Personal message to troops of 21st Army Group on the eve of D-Day,

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• Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Memories, Essence, Inversions

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• I like to create imaginary characters and events around a real historical situation. I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have.

  Ken Follett

  Real, Character, Events

  Interview with Ann Bruns, www.bookreporter.com. December 15, 2000.

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• ZOOLOGY, n. The science and history of the animal kingdom, including its king, the House Fly ("Musca maledicta"). The father of Zoology was Aristotle, as is universally conceded, but the name of its mother has not come down to us.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Mother, Kings, Father

  Ambrose Bierce (2011). “Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs”, p.843, Library of America

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• Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.

  Charles Kettering

  Philosophy, Writing, Science

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• There is a moment in the history of every nation, when . . . the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant . . . with his feet still planted on the immense forces of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation.

  Marsilio Ficino

  Eye, Night, Men

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• In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet.

  Arthur Koestler

  Order, Names, Vision

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• Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. . . . Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

  Angela Carter

  Change, Enemy, Doe

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• I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.

  A. E. Housman

  Philosophy, Personal History, World

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• This generation, raised on "Eyewitness News," conditioned by the instant replay, and spared the illumination that comes from tedious historical study, tends to be even more ahistorical than most.

  Harry S. Truman

  Illumination, Political, Instant Replay

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• For man as an historical creature has desires of indeterminate dimensions.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Men, Desire, Creatures

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2010). “The Irony of American History”, p.84, University of Chicago Press

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• Marxism must abhor nothing so much as the possibility that it becomes congealed in its current form. It is at its best when butting heads in self-criticism, and in historical thunder and lightning, it retains its strength.

  Rosa Luxemburg

  Self, Criticism, Lightning

  "Quote Junkie : Political Edition". Book by Hagopian Institute, 2008.

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• The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism

  Nancy Hartsock

  Feminist, Materialism, Standpoint

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• Killing Lincoln is a must-read historical thriller. Bill O'Reilly recounts the dramatic events of the spring of 1865 with such exhilarating immediacy that you will feel like you are walking the streets of Washington DC on the night that John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. This is a hugely entertaining, heart-stopping read.

  Vince Flynn

  Spring, Heart, Night

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• As founder and co-chair of the upper Mississippi River Congressional task force, I have long sought to preserve the river's health and historical multiple uses, including as a natural waterway and a home to wildlife, for the benefit of future generations of Americans.

  Ron Kind

  Home, Rivers, Long

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• The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

  Richard Hofstadter

  Men, Expression, Ideas

  "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". Harper's Magazine, November 1964.

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• Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science.

  Edward Sapir

  Realizing, Anthropology

  Edward Sapir, David Goodman Mandelbaum (1985). “Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality”, p.391, Univ of California Press

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• When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history.

  Charlotte Mary Yonge

  Taken, Character, Liberty

  Charlotte Mary Yonge (2015). “Delphi Complete Novels of Charlotte Mary Yonge (Illustrated)”, p.7498, Delphi Classics

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• It is important to remember that the Pacific Ocean covers a quarter of the world's surface and that each Pacific country has its own cultural, historical and ethnic identity.

  Jenny Shipley

  Country, Ocean, Important

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• The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.

  Herbert Croly

  Loyalty, Hands, Patriotism

  Herbert Croly (2005). “The Promise of American Life”, p.2, Cosimo, Inc.

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