Human History Quotes - Page 10

• Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches and in punishment there is so much that is festive!

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Punishment, Festivals, Ancient

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Arlie J. Hoover (1994). “Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Thought”, Praeger Publishers

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• The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.

  Karl Marx

  Firsts, Facts, Individual

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1970). “The German Ideology”, p.42, INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS CO

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• An acquaintanceship with the literature of the world may be won by any person who will devote half an hour a day to the careful reading of the best books. The habit of reading good books is one that gives great comfort in all the stages and among all the vicissitudes of life. The man who has learned to love good reading is never alone. His friends are the great ones of human history, and to them he may always go for stimulating and helpful communion. -GQ 71

  John Andreas Widtsoe

  Love, Book, Reading

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• Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.

  Philip Wylie

  Wise, Cheer, Men

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• '2001' was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Lying, Sea, Forever

  "Writer Arthur C. Clarke Dies at 90" by Ravi Nessman in the "Associated Press", March 18, 2008.

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• The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.

  Susan Sontag

  Cancer, Civilization, White

  'Partisan Review' Winter 1967, p. 57

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• If you look at all of the villains in the course of human history, they've all believed, delusionally, in the virtue of their actions - every villain is a hero in his own mind.

  Tom Hiddleston

  Hero, Mind, Looks

  "Marvel Avengers Assemble - Tom Hiddleston interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• The answers to our problems don't lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth. Those qualities that have made America the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history we still possess in ample measure.

  Barack Obama

  Lying, Pride, America

  First Speech to a Joint Session of Congress, delivered 24 February 2009

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• Every great crisis of human history is a pass of Thermopylae, and there is always a Leonidas and his three hundred to die in it, if they can not conquer.

  George William Curtis

  Three, Conquer, Hundred

  "The Call of Freedom". "Orations and Addresses" by George William Curtis, www.bartleby.com. 1894.

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• Everyone's life is a page in the human history irrespective of the position he or she holds or the work he or she performs.

  Abdul Kalam

  Pages, Life Is, Position

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• We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied peoples joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

  Ronald Reagan

  War, Years, Europe

  Remarks on the 40th Anniversary of D-Day, delivered 6 June 1984 in Pointe Du Hoc, Normandy, France

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• If you are hungry for food, you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.

  Stephen Fry

  People, Curiosity, Care

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• It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped.

  Robert Kennedy

  Courage, Peace, Volunteer

  Robert F. Kennedy (1968). “"An Honorable profession": a tribute to Robert F. Kennedy”

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• It is easier and much more satisfying to rail against the Right than to suggest that we go back to Genesis 1 and study together. Liberals can be just as intolerant as fundamentalists, and we have arrived at a moment in human history when intolerance and hope are mutually exclusive.

  Robin Meyers

  Together, Study, Moments

  Robin R. Meyers (2009). “Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus”, p.6, Harper Collins

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• Religion isn't best understood primarily as a collection of beliefs held by backward people with fear and trembling for most of human history (religion as brainwash). It is rather, among other things, a scriptorium of beleaguered witness, a record of collated information, both fragmentary and sometimes systematic, with which we may feel compelled to reckon as it somehow, across history, reckons with us, an inheritance, if you like, of difficult wisdom.

  David Dark

  People, Records, May

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• In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.

  H. L. Mencken

  Victory, Moral, Disaster

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.199, Vintage

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• Our western science is a child of moral virtues; and it must now become the father of further moral virtues if its extraordinary material triumphs in our time are not to bring human history to an abrupt, unpleasant and discreditable end.

  Arnold J. Toynbee

  Children, Father, Science

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• I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

  Antonio Tabucchi

  War, People, Grandfather

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• Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.

  Carl Sagan

  Thinking, World, Belief

  Carl Sagan, Jerald F. TerHorst, Allan J. Mayer, Sharon S. McKern, Laurence J. Peter (1980). “Broca's brain: reflections on the romance of science”

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• We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.

  Jeremy Rifkin

  Population, Entering, Phases

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• We stand on a great threshold in the human history of space exploration. If life is prevalent in our neighborhood of the galaxy, it is within our resources and technological reach to be the first generation in human history to finally cross this threshold, and to learn if there is life of any kind beyond Earth.

  Sara Seager

  Moon, Space, Generations

  "Life beyond Earth seems 'inevitable', US planetary scientist says", www.theguardian.com. August 4, 2014.

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• Food is "everyday"-it has to be, or we would not survive for long. But food is never just something to eat. It is something to find or hunt or cultivate first of all; for most of human history we have spent a much longer portion of our lives worrying about food, and plotting, working, and fighting to obtain it, than we have in any other pursuit. As soon as we can count on a food supply (and so take food for granted), and not a moment sooner, we start to civilize ourselves.

  Margaret Visser

  Food, Fighting, Long

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• We are at a major epoch in human history, which is that we don't need sex to recreate the race. You can have babies without sex. This is the first time in human history that has been true, and it means, for example, we could do some extraordinary things.

  David Cronenberg

  Baby, Sex, Mean

  "Controversial visionary David Cronenberg sees technology, mankind, sexuality merging in 'eXistenZ'". Interview with Rob Blackwelder, splicedwire.com. April 14, 1999.

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• I think the rise of China is one of the great events of all economic and human history, and I think this will be overwhelmingly a positive thing for the region and the world.

  Paul Keating

  Thinking, Events, World

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Some scholars have been arguing that a civilizational clash between organized religions is the next step in human history.

  Mary Douglas

  Steps, Next, Arguing

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