History Of Life Quotes

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  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

  George Santayana

  Past, Infancy Is, History

  "The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress", Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense by George Santayana, 1905-1906.

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  History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

  James Joyce

  Truth, History, Trying

  Ulysses (1922)

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• History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

  Winston Churchill

  Inspirational, Positive, Badass

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• People will never forget how you made them feel.

  Maya Angelou

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  Maya Angelou (2014). “Rainbow in the Cloud: The Wisdom and Spirit of Maya Angelou”, p.37, Random House

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• Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.

  James W. Loewen

  Past, Infancy Is, History

  James W. Loewen (2013). “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong”, p.16, The New Press

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• History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Guidance, Passing, Witness

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• History illumes reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Memories, Reality, Daily Life

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• History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquities. 


  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Memories, Reality, History

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• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

  Errol Morris

  Past, Infancy Is, History

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• The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

  Mark Twain

  Sad, Writing History, Historical

  Mark Twain (2015). “Bite-Size Twain: Wit and Wisdom from the Literary Legend”, p.54, St. Martin's Press

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• Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

  H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  "P.S. I Love You: When Mom Wrote, She Always Saved the Best for Last". Book by H. Jackson Brown, Jr., March 1, 1991.

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• Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

  William Irwin Thompson

  Fairy Tale, Natural, Form

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• In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life's history as generalities.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Struggle, Events, May

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.402, Harvard University Press

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• If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, then we will have achieved something so unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing our swansong with joy - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Years, Joy, Astronomy

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History”, p.142, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The public image of dinosaurs is tainted by extinction. It's hard to accept dinosaurs as a success when they are all dead. But the fact of ultimate extinction should not make us overlook the absolutely unsurpassed role dinosaurs played in the history of life.

  Robert T. Bakker

  Roles, Dinosaurs, Extinction

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• Cancer is not something confined to human beings. It's found in all multi cellular organisms where the adult cells proliferate, so it's widespread in the biosphere. It's a phenomenon that is deeply related to the history of life itself, so by studying cancer I think we can illuminate the history of life itself and vice versa.

  Paul Davies

  Cancer, Thinking, Cells

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Life creeps slowly upward.... When some forgotten inventor of the older world smote his rival or enemy with a branch of wood and found that it was good and thereafter made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artificiality may be said to have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution destined to change the history of life. Then, and on that day, was laid the cornerstone of that most tremendous of artifices, CIVILIZATION!

  Jack London

  Practice, Civilization, Enemy

  Jack London (2014). “The Kempton-Wase Letters”, p.75, Simon and Schuster

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• Can I pay any higher tribute to a man [George Gaylord Simpson] than to state that his work both established a profession and sowed the seeds for its own revision? If Simpson had reached final truth, he either would have been a priest or would have chosen a dull profession. The history of life cannot be a dull profession.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Life, Science, Men

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• The problem with allowing God a role in the history of life is not that science would cease, but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of something important which is outside the boundaries of natural science.

  Phillip E. Johnson

  Important, Roles, Problem

  Phillip E. Johnson (2000). “Objections Sustained: Subversive Essays on Evolution, Law and Culture”, Intervarsity Press

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• The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Life, Progress, Expansion

  Stephen Jay Gould (1991). “Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• Bought the Vegematic and Pocket Fisherman, too, illuminated illustrated history of Life, and Boxcar Willie.

  Steve Goodman

  Musical, Pockets, Fisherman

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• If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially peabrained dinosaurs.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Moon, Skeletons, Museums

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• To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

  Santiago Ramon y Cajal

  Brain, Intimate, External Forces

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• Man did not address his inquiries to the earth on which he stood until a remarkably late stage in the development of his desire for knowledge. And the answers he received to the questions, "Where do I come from?", "What is man?", although they made him poorer by a few illusions, gave him in compensation a knowledge of his past that is vaster than he could ever have dreamed. For it emerged that the history of life was his history too.

  Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald

  Men, Past, Desire

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• The history of life was not the bumbling progress - the very English, middle-class progress - Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.

  Salman Rushdie

  Class, Progress, Revolution

  Salman Rushdie (1989). “The Satanic Verses”, New York, N.Y. : Viking

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