History Quotes - Page 27

• Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Believe, Looks, Crabs

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• One age cannot be completely understood if all the others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Song, Age, Understood

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• Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Truth, Poetry, Standards

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.1089, Delphi Classics

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• The use of history is to tell us what we are, for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our tradition pours into us.

  Learned Hand

  Empty Vessels, Use, Birth

  Learned Hand (1959). “The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses”

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• Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized--the question involuntarily arises--to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Sacrifice, Principles, Finals

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (2012). “The Philosophy of History”, p.21, Courier Corporation

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• I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called history is.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Village, Shallow, Tales

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015). “Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays: First and Second Series”, p.6, Library of America

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• It is beyond a doubt that during the sixteenth century, and the years immediately preceding and following it, poisoning had been brought to a pitch of perfection which remains unknown to modern chemistry, but which is indisputably proved by history. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was at that time, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are lost.

  Honore de Balzac

  Years, Perfection, Secret

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• When God wants to speak and deal with us, he does not avail himself of an angel but of parents, or the pastor, or of our neighbor.

  Martin Luther

  Angel, Past, Parent

  Martin Luther, Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann (1955). “Works”

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• Even here in America, we felt the cool, refreshing breeze of freedom when Nelson Mandela took the seat of Presidency in his country where formerly he was not even allowed to vote. We were enlarged by tears of pride as we saw Nelson Mandela's former prison guards invited, courteously, by him to watch from the front rows his inauguration.

  Maya Angelou

  Leadership, Wisdom, Country

  'His Day Is Done' - Poem in Tribute to Nelson Mandela, delivered December 2013

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• A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

  Aristotle

  Truth, Giving, Poetry

  Aristotle, Longinus, Demetrius (of Phaleron) (1932). “The poetics”

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• Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.

  Victor Hugo

  Drama, Epic, Simplicity

  Victor Hugo (1909). “The Works of Victor Hugo ...”

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• I think by the age of about nine I recognized that there were a lot of different religions, and it was an accident I happened to be born into one of them. If I had been born somewhere else, I would have had a different one. Which is a pretty good lesson, actually. Everyone should learn that.

  Richard Dawkins

  Wisdom, Thinking, Somewhere Else

  "Interview: Richard Dawkins Keeps Making New Enemies". Interview with Isaac Chotiner, newrepublic.com. October 29, 2013.

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• Odd how often blood is shed to obtain freedom from those in power. Oppressors must be the most insecure people in the world.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Leadership, Wisdom, Spring

  Twitter post from Dec 08, 2013

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• ... the histories of Blacks and Jews in bondage and out of bondage, have been blood histories pursued through our kindred searchings for self-determination. Let this blood be a stain of honor that we share. Let us not now become enemies to ourselves and to each other.

  June Jordan

  Determination, Blood, Self

  June Jordan (1985). “On call: political essays”, South End Pr

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• When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history.

  Arthur Koestler

  Passion, Men, Criticism

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• First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that ofyears ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.

  James Joyce

  Men, Race, Illustration

  James Joyce (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of James Joyce (Illustrated)”, p.2179, Delphi Classics

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• If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet.

  Herman Melville

  May, Individual, Candor

  Herman Melville (2016). “Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories”, p.165, Penguin

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• As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Passion, Character, Romance

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• History goes out of control almost as often as nature does.

  Mason Cooley

  Doe

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

  Mason Cooley

  Memories, Creative, Opponents

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• History takes place between the Fall and the Apocalypse, with a narrow escape route called Salvation.

  Mason Cooley

  Fall, Apocalypse, Salvation

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• History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

  Albert Camus

  Eye, Finals, Analysis

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.289, Vintage

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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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• ... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

  Adrienne Rich

  Philosophy, Past, Wind

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.95, W. W. Norton & Company

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