History Quotes - Page 33

• It is given to us to live for the most part under the guidance of mathematics ... It is impossible to distinguish from other living creatures anyone who does not understand how to quantify.

  Cassiodorus

  Doe, Impossible, Guidance

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• Why waste words? Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself (what exists in God that is not God himself?): geometry provided God with a model for the Creation and was implanted into man, together with God's own likeness - and not merely conveyed to his mind through the eyes.

  Johannes Kepler

  Eye, Men, Mind

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• If a beach-head of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

  John F. Kennedy

  Beach, Strong, Law

  Inaugural address, 20 Jan. 1961

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• History will not judge our endeavors--and a government cannot be selected--merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these.

  John F. Kennedy

  Loyalty, Party, Government

  Address to a Joint Convention of the General Court of, delivered 9 January 1961

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• ... 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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