History Quotes - Page 21

• A nation does not create the historians it deserves; the historians are far more likely to create the nation.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Doe, Historian, Nations

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• historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Historical, Research, Study

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• History, in spite of the occasional protest of historians, will always be used in a general way as a collection of political and moral precedents.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Political, Way, Moral

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• All normal human beings are interested in their past. Only when the interest becomes an obsession, overshadowing present and future conduct, is it a danger. In much the same way healthy nations are interested in their history, but a morbid preoccupation with past glories is a sign that something is wrong with the constitution of the State.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Past, Healthy, Way

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• The selective winnowing of time leaves only a few recognizable individuals behind for the historian to light on. Thus the historian who finds the human being more interesting than what the human being has done must inevitably endow the comparatively few individuals he can identify with too great an importance in relation to their time. Even so, I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an unhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  Light, Dust, Sea

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• The volumes which record the history of the human race are filled with the deeds and the words of great men ... [but] The Twentieth Century Woman ... questions the completeness of the story.

  Mary Ritter Beard

  Men, Race, Stories

  Mary Ritter Beard, Nancy F. Cott (1991). “A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard Through Her Letters”, p.19, Yale University Press

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• Most American heroes of the Revolutionary period are by now two men, the actual man and the romantic image. Some are even three men - the actual man, the image, and the debunked remains.

  Esther Forbes

  Hero, Men, Two

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• A cultivated reader of history is domesticated in all families; he dines with Pericles, and sups with Titian.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Dine, Reader

  Robert Aris Willmott (1907). “Pleasures of Literature”

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• History is a great painter, with the world for canvas, and life for a figure. It exhibits man in his pride, and nature in her magnificence,--Jerusalem bleeding under the Roman, or Lisbon vanishing in flame and earthquake. History must be splendid. Bacon called it the pomp of business. Its march is in high places, and along the pinnacles and points of great affairs.

  Robert Aris Willmott

  Pride, Men, Flames

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• war with poison and chemicals was not so rare in the ancient world ... An astounding panoply of toxic substances, venomous creatures, poison plants, animals and insects, deleterious environments, virulent pathogens, infectious agents, noxious gases, and combustible chemicals were marshalled to defeat foes - and panoply is an apt term here, because it is the ancient Greek word for 'all weapons.

  Adrienne Mayor

  War, Animal, Greek

  Adrienne Mayor (2009). “Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World”, Duckworth Publishing

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• Not only is history written by the winners, it is also made by them.

  Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza

  Winner, Made, Written

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• That's the history of the world. His story is told, hers isn't.

  Dolores Huerta

  Stories, World, Sexism

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• The history of one is the history of all.

  Grace King

  Grace King, E. Catherine Falvey (1994). “Balcony Stories”, p.11, Rowman & Littlefield

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• The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.

  Susan Jacoby

  Groups, Causes, Forget

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• I feel it is our inherent duty as a humane society, above any intangible responsibility, to invest in our world's children's potential, passion and confidence.

  Masiela Lusha

  Family, Leadership, Education

  Tolucan Times, October 27, 2010.

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• It is undeniable that others and the larger world, so beleaguered at this moment in history, need everything that we have to give. But what to give is the problem. It seems finally clear that we cannot find out what to do simply by thinking about it. We need to gain our inspiration and our direction from much deeper sources.

  Reginald Ray

  Inspiration, Thinking, Giving

  Reginald A. Ray (2008). “Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body”, p.334, Sounds True

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• This is a very fickle and faithless generation.

  William Kidd

  Generations, Fickle, Faithless

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• How strangely is antiquity treated! To answer some purposes it is spoken of as the times of darkness and ignorance, and to answer others, it is put for the light of the world.

  Thomas Paine

  Ignorance, Light, Darkness

  Thomas Paine (1848). “Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution”, p.108

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• The whole point of society is to be less unforgiving than nature.

  Arthur D. Hlavaty

  Whole, Unforgiving

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• Never, ever rest on your laurels. Today's laurels are tomorrow's compost.

  Tom Peters

  Today, Tomorrow, Laurels

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• Sport is a seductive metaphor (life as a game in which we gain victory through hard work, discipline, and visualizing success). but the older metaphor of farming (life as hard labor that is subject to weather and quirks of blind fate and may return no reward whatsoever and don't be surprised) is still in our blood.

  Garrison Keillor

  Sports, Hard Work, Fate

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• One only has an adventure when one makes a mistake, but [as] my grandmother used to say: "You don't have to get out of trouble if you don't get into trouble."

  Richard S. Wheeler

  Mistake, Adventure, Grandmother

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• The way Bernard Shaw believes in himself is very refreshing in these atheistic days when so many people believe in no God at all.

  Israel Zangwill

  Believe, People, Way

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• The more I think you over, the more it comes home to me what an unmitigated Middle Victorian ass you are!

  H. L. Mencken

  Home, Thinking, Ass

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• Did a sense of shame ever reside in our Republican toadies? You can't stop people who are never embarrassed by themselves. Will's readiness to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse can be cited as world class sycophancy.

  Norman Mailer

  Class, People, Ears

  "In the Ring" by Norman Mailer, www.newyorker.com. October 6, 2008.

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