Historical Quotes - Page 9

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

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Memories, Essence, Inversions

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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 corniest movie ever made about the white man's need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.

  Armond White

  Men, White, Political

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• Homeopathy may be defined as a specious mode of doing nothing. While it waits on the natural progress of disease and the restorative tendence of nature on the one hand, or the injurious advance of disease on the other, it supplies the craving for activity, on the part of the patient and his friends, by the formal and regular administration of nominal medicine. Although homeopathy will, at some future time, be classed with historical delusions.

  Jacob Bigelow

  Hands, Medicine, Waiting

  Jacob Bigelow (1867). “Modern Inquiries, Classical, Professional, and Miscellaneous”, p.231

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• I think you just have to turn it around and say we are at this absolute historical moment. No generation has ever been as powerful as us. We have the future of our species in our hands. We could be the generation that people look back on and say, 'They bloody did it!', not 'They didn't bother.'

  Franny Armstrong

  Powerful, Thinking, Hands

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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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• No degree of prosperity could justify
  the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to
  make safe and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or
  even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself,
  a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime perpetrated by man.
  The idea that a civilization could sustain itself on such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economical affairs of man
  as if people did not matter at all.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Spiritual, Mean, Men

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• 'Believing' cannot tip the scales in making a historical judgement about whether something really happened. I can choose to believe that George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock, but my believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether or not he really did do it. So also with the story of Jesus walking on water: Believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether he really did do it. 'Belief' cannot be the basis for historical conclusions; it has no direct relevance.

  Marcus Borg

  Faith, Jesus, Believe

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• History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.

  Ted Koppel

  History, Tourism, Tools

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• Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Funny, People, Generations

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• We live in a historical period characterized by a sharp discrepancy between the intellectual development of man... and his mental-emotional development, which has left him still in a state of marked narcissism with all its pathological symptoms.

  Christopher Lasch

  Men, Emotional, Discrepancies Between

  Christopher Lasch (1991). “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I think utopianism and eschatology are really two sides of the same coin. They both assume that some massively transformative event is going to happen that's going to completely change the nature of society. They only disagree on whether we get a happy ending or all die horribly. And so utopianism is on the wane right now because at the moment most of the plausible candidates for huge historical transformation look like they're going to kill us.

  Phillip Sandifer

  Thinking, Two Sides, Events

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• After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.

  Iris Chang

  Book, Writing, Interesting

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• It's like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five ... Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066.

  David Attenborough

  Believe, Two, Wish

  "Attenborough reveals creationist hate mail for not crediting God" by Riazat Butt, www.theguardian.com. January 26, 2009.

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• I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure — that's a verifiable fact.

  Megyn Kelly

  Jesus, Mean, Men

  "No, Megyn Kelly, Santa Is Not White" by Ben Dreyfuss, www.motherjones.com. December 12, 2013.

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• By analyzing data from Greenwich Observatory in the period 1836-1953, John A. Eddy [Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and High Altitude Observatory in Boulder] and Aram A. Boornazian [mathematician with S. Ross and Co. in Boston] have found evidence that the sun has been contracting about 0.1% per century during that time, corresponding to a shrinkage rate of about 5 feet per hour. And digging deep into historical records, Eddy has found 400-year-old eclipse observations that are consistent with such a shrinkage.

  Jonathan Sarfati

  Years, Data, Feet

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• The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.

  Eric Ries

  Imagination, Quality, Prosperity

  Eric Ries (2011). “The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses”, p.273, Crown Business

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• Density, complexity, and historical-semantic value that is so strong as to make politics possible... Gramsci's insight is to have recognised that subordination, fracturing, diffusion, reproducing, as much as producing, creating, forcing, guiding, are necessary aspects of elaboration.

  Edward Said

  Strong, Creating, Density

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• I am myself persuaded, on the basis of extensive study of the historical evidence, that... the severity of each of the contractions - 1920-21, 1929-33, and 1937-38 - is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities and would not have occurred under earlier monetary and banking arrangements.

  Milton Friedman

  Omission, Banking, Study

  Milton Friedman (2009). “Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition”, p.45, University of Chicago Press

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• One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.

  Jared Diamond

  Lying, Long, Finals

  Jared Diamond (2017). “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”, p.393, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Juliet is one of those rare novels that has it all: lush prose, tightly intertwined parallel narratives, intrigue, and historical detail all set against a backdrop of looming danger. Anne Fortier casts a new light on one of history's greatest stories of passion. I was swept away.

  Sara Gruen

  Passion, Light, Details

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