Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
The pages of history are red with the blood of illuminated "saints" who were murdered by their religions for actually achieving the advertised spiritual rewards.
Right time, right place, right people equals success. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.
Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that.
I feel like these characters, these places, these beings and plots, and even these inanimate objects are counting on me for survival. It’s my responsibility to reveal them to the world, to show my readers the names of these things, to show them the...
We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.
In reality, though, the first thing to ask of history is that it should point out to us the paths of liberty. The great lesson to draw from revolutions is not that they devour humanity but rather that tyranny never fails to generate them.
[In geology,] As in history, the material in hand remains silent if no questions are asked. The nature of these questions depends on the 'school' to which the geologist belongs and on the objectivity of his investigations. Hans Cloos called this way ...
Looking at my life through the lens of history has made me increasingly grateful to standout women who pushed those boundaries to make the changes from which I have benefited.
By any reasonable standard (i.e. he didn’t cheat), Aaron is one of the greatest sluggers in baseball history—and there shouldn’t even be a debate about who is baseball’s true all-time home run champion (again, no cheating).
the Reagan years "produced one of the most dramatic redistributions of income in the nation's history....The income of families in the bottom decile fell by 10.4 percent...while the income of those in the top one percent rose by 87.1 percent." Chain ...
I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
An old adage warns: If you don't know your history, you will be forever condemned to repeat it. Likewise, if you don't know your science fiction, and heed its warnings, you could condemn the Earth to future catastrophe.
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.
You can lie but you can't re-write history. Even if you could, what would you say to those who lived it and helped you thru, some of the darkest periods of your life?
Political corruption is endemic all over this country, in some places worse than others, right? On crime, you have all the major American cities where the crime rates at different points in their histories, have spiked dramatically.
I don't read many popular histories like the ones I write. The building blocks for my research are scholarly monographs, and the inspiration for my storytelling style are folks like Chekhov.
Catholicism ... tries to grab all the poker chips on the table, kick everybody out of the game, and then pretend they were never there until the game was effectively over. It's just a ridiculous, obvious revisionist history.
You have to look at people now that were members of the Klu Klux Klan or whatever else and now are trying to rewrite their personal histories to tell that they've always been tolerant. It's not peculiar to want to sanitize what you did.
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us. But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.
Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.
