History Quotes - Page 17

• Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.

  Anais Nin

  Prejudice, Blindness, Irrationality

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• The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror, which merely reflects objects, but of the judge, who sees, listens, and decides.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Mirrors, Judging, Objects

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• The whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death.

  Plato

  Art, Philosophy, Preparation

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• Truth comes to us from the past, as gold is washed down from the mountains of Sierra Nevada, in minute but precious particles, and intermixed with infinite alloy, the debris of the centuries.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Past, Gold, Mountain

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• The most common characteristic of women's history is to be lost and discovered, lost again and rediscovered, lost once more and re-rediscovered - a process of tragic waste and terrible silences that will continue until women's stories are a full and equal part of the human story.

  Gloria Steinem

  Silence, Waste, Stories

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• Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.

  Jean Piaget

  Art, Philosophy, Tendencies

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• We can stand only a certain amount of unhappiness; anything beyond that annihilates us or passes us by, leaving us apathethetic.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Philosophy, Leaving

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• History, we know, is apt to repeat itself.

  George Eliot

  Repeats, Knows

  George Eliot (1884*). “Silas Marner, The lifted veil, and Brother Jacob. Scenes of clerical life”

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• History has informed us that bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Men, Body, Politics

  Thomas Jefferson (1774). “A summary view of the rights of British America: Set forth in some resolutions intended for the inspection of the present delegates of the people of Virginia, now in convention ...”, p.7

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• We must consider how very little history there is--I mean real, authentic history. That certain kings reigned and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the coloring, all the philosophy, of history is conjecture.

  Samuel Johnson

  Kings, Philosophy, Real

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1859). “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides”, p.526

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• Making fun of philosophy is really philosophising.

  Blaise Pascal

  Art, Fun, Philosophy

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• Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.

  Lewis Thomas

  Art, Philosophy, Essentials

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• Science is a cemetary of dead ideas.

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Art, Philosophy, Ideas

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• We can only know where we're going if we know where we've been.

  Maya Angelou

  Past, Knows, Ifs

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• History is neither more nor less than biography on a large scale.

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Biographies, Scales, Large Scale

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• Very often history is a means of denying the past.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Mean, Past

  Jeanette Winterson (2007). “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”, p.93, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• For girls and women, storytelling has a double and triple importance. Because the stories of our lives have been marginalized and ignored by history, and often dismissed and treated as 'gossip' within our own cultures and families, female human beings are more likely to be discouraged from telling our stories and from listening to each other with seriousness.

  Gloria Steinem

  Girl, Gossip, Listening

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• We live ruins amid ruins.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Philosophy, Ruins

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• ...scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young...there is no mastery, old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature...Its a form of inherited wealth. And you know what assholes congenitally rich people are.

  Michael Crichton

  Humility, Discipline, People

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• Sin writes histories, goodness is silent.
  [Ger., Das Uebel macht eine Geschichte und das Gute keine.]

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Writing, Sin, Silent

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• This I hold to be the chief office of history, to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved expressions and base actions.

  Tacitus

  Men, Expression, Office

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• The truth has never been told about women in history: that everywhere man has gone woman has gone too, and what he has done she has done also. Women are ignorant of their own past and ignorant of their own importance in that past.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Past, Men, Ignorant

  Pearl S. Buck (1941). “Of Men and Women”

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• The mystery of history is an insoluble problem.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Mystery, Problem

  Henry Ward Beecher (1871). “Plymouth Pulpit: A Weekly Publication of Sermons Preached by Henry Ward Beecher”, p.469

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• History is clarified experience.

  James Russell Lowell

  James Russell Lowell (1910). “Literary and political addresses”

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• The history of the past is a mere puppet-show. A little man comes out and blows a little trumpet, and goes in again. You look for something new, and lo! another little man comes out, and blows another little trumpet, and goes in again. And it is all over.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Men, Blow, Past

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1886). “The Prose Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Outre Mer and Driftwood”

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