Quotes of: Contemporary-history Keyword

People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related.

Michael Strogoff

['non-white' gay men] are run over at the intersection of racism and homophobia

The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles

The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.

Selections from the Prison Notebooks

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

Reviewing a book written by someone you're living with and sleeping with is, needless to say, wrong.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

The true socialist utopia turns out to be a field of F-1 hybrid plants.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

What laid me low was no mystical vision, no message from God, but a blow of compassion. In a wakeful mind, no force is more terrible, or precious.

A Private History of Awe

Even the disciples, who at times could be dense as bricks, realized that the true neighbor was the one who showed mercy to a stranger.

A Private History of Awe

What's remarkable about old age is not that we wear out but that we last so long in the grip of gravity.

A Private History of Awe

It is never right to injure anyone. It can never be right to make someone worse than he is.

On Politics: A History of Political Thought from Herodotus to the Present

Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to inheritance left by our ancestors.

The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical".

The Whig Interpretation of History

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking

There comes a point where emotions must give way to objective facts.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking