History Quotes - Page 27

• Creative memory is the historian's most subtle opponent.

  Mason Cooley

  Memories, Creative, Opponents

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• If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.

  Albert Camus

  Character, Men, Choices

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.221, Vintage

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• We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.

  Adrienne Rich

  Writing, White, Political

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• False history gets made all day, any day,
  the truth of the new is never on the news
  False history gets written every day
  ...
  the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
  sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing,
  asking the clay all questions but her own.

  Adrienne Rich

  Clay, Watches, News

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981”, p.2, W. W. Norton & Company

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• A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious.

  Jim Bishop

  Guy, Good Writers, Suspicious

  Talk With Jim Bishop" by Lewis Nichols, www.nytimes.com. February 6, 1955.

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• One age is like another for the soul.

  Robert Frost

  Soul, Age

  Robert Frost (1963). “Selected poems”

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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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• Language is our body and our breath, our world and our thought, our perception and even out unconscious.

  Philippe Sollers

  Art, Philosophy, Our World

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• Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.

  Alfred de Vigny

  Art, Wall, Philosophy

  "Values of the Wise" by Jason Merchey, (p. 200), 2004.

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• We live ruins amid ruins.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Philosophy, Ruins

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

  Plato

  Art, Philosophy, Preparation

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• There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Art, Philosophy, Real

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

  Alphonse de Lamartine

  Biographies, Scales, Large Scale

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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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts; it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called 'eternal.' What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Drama, Book, Night

  Elizabeth Bowen (2015). “A Time In Rome”, p.10, Random House

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• Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate...

  Emma Lazarus

  Mother, Fate, Years

  Emma Lazarus (2014). “The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Volume II: Jewish Poems and Translations”, p.22, Courier Corporation

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