History Quotes - Page 28

• 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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• Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.

  John Dos Passos

  Art, Block, Past

  John Dos Passos (1964). “Occasions and protests”

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• Prostitution thrives in the United States. We focus in this country on punishing the girls. For every brothel owner or pimp or male customer, there are 50 girls who are arrested for being prostitutes. Other countries have tried the other way around, and it works beautifully...they bring the charges against the brothel owners and the pimps and the male customers, and they do not prosecute the girls, who quite often are brought into that trade involuntarily. It works quite well, by the way.

  Jimmy Carter

  Girl, Country, Reality

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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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• A turning point in modern history.

  Robert Frost

  America, Modern, Turning Points

  Robert Frost (1975). “The poetry of Robert Frost”

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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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• I don't fly any awards at the house. Any award you get is usually for something you've done in the past. And I like to keep looking forward.

  Garth Brooks

  Military, War, Past

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• ... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.

  Gertrude Stein

  War, Done, World

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Wars I Have Seen”, p.84, Random House

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• ... there has never been a period in history when there have been necessary killings which has not been instantly followed by a period when there have been unnecessary killings.

  Rebecca West

  Unnecessary, Killing, Periods

  Rebecca West (1928). “The strange necessity: essays by Rebecca West”

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• Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another agewhen so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Thoughtful, Thinking, Order

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• A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.

  Stendhal

  Marriage, Heart, Boredom

  Stendhal (2016). “The Red and the Black: World Classics”, p.168, World Classic

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• Here's a woman, a real pioneer for other women looking for careers in stand-up comedy. And talk about guts - she would come out here and sit in this chair and say some things that were unbelievable - where you would have to swallow pretty hard... but it was hilarious... the force of her comedy was overpowering.

  David Letterman

  Leadership, Fashion, Real

  "Joan Rivers Dead: Hollywood Mourns Comedian" by Hilary Lewis, www.hollywoodreporter.com. September 4, 2014.

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• Anyone who renounces the world must love all men, for he renounces their world too. He thus begins to have some inkling of the true nature of man, which cannot but be loved, always assuming that one is its peer.

  Franz Kafka

  Men, Peers, World

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• People move forward into the future out of the way they comprehend the past. When we don't understand something in our past, we are therefore crippled.

  Norman Mailer

  Military, War, Moving

  Norman Mailer (1972). “Existential errands”, Signet

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• Director Ken Burns revealed that his next documentary is about Franklin Roosevelt, and it's fourteen hours long...which sounds like too much, until you realize there's been over thirty hours of TV dedicated to Honey Boo Boo.

  Jimmy Fallon

  Reality, Long, Community

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• Who does not know history's first law to be that an author must not dare to tell anything but the truth? And its second that he must make bold to tell the whole truth? That there must be no suggestion of partiality anywhere in his writings? Nor of malice?

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Truth, Writing, Law

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• We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Blood, Body, Flesh

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• ... not only dowomen sufferindignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Song, Philosophy, Sacred

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• The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process.

  Herbert Butterfield

  Military, War, Historical

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• The scientific observer of the realm of nature is in a sense naturally and inevitably disinterested. At least, nothing in the natural scene can arouse his bias. Furthermore, he stands completely outside of the natural so that his mind, whatever his limitations, approximates pure mind. The observer of the realm of history cannot be disinterested in the same way, for two reasons: first, he must look at history from some locus in history; secondly, he is to a certain degree engaged in its ideological conflicts.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Science, Two, Mind

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• We shall not understand the history of men and other times unless we ourselves are alive to the requirements which that history satisfied.

  Benedetto Croce

  Men, Alive, Satisfied

  Benedetto Croce (1941). “History as the Story of Liberty”

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• If, then, this civilization is to be saved, if it is not to be submerged by centuries of barbarism, but to secure the treasures ofits inheritance on new and more stable foundations, there is indeed need for those now living fully to realize how far the decay has already progressed.

  Johan Huizinga

  War, Civilization, Foundation

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• People accept a representation in which the elements of wish and fantasy are purposely included but which nevertheless proclaims to represent "the past" and to serve as a guide-rule for life, thereby hopelessly confusing the spheres of knowledge and will.

  Johan Huizinga

  Truth, Past, People

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• We are living in a demented world. And we know it. It would not come as a surprise to anyone if tomorrow the madness gave way to afrenzy which would leave our poor Europe in a state of distracted stupor, with engines still turning and flags streaming in the breeze, but with the spirit gone.

  Johan Huizinga

  War, Europe, Flags

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• He who wishes to maintain that the past of mankind no longer has any absolute value in lifemust also be ready to deny his ownlife until the present moment, indeed in advance until the last moment, as worthless. He who realizes that culture is the giving of form will also see that the highest forms that it is given to the human spirit to recognize have always been, psychologically considered, such evasions from the present. Considerations such as these do not at all square with the direction of America's mind.

  Johan Huizinga

  Past, Squares, America

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