I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
If history could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.
Elimination of illiteracy is as serious an issue to our history as the abolition of slavery.
The Vietnamese see their history as an unending series of struggles of resistance to aggression, by the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese, the French, and now the Americans.
As an author of narrative history, I read a lot of history books.
People always want to be on the right side of history; it is a lot easier to say, 'What an atrocity that was' then it is to say, 'What an atrocity this is.'
History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
To investigate the history of man's development, the most important finds are, of course, hominid fossils.
The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.
I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.
History can bring luck: this is what we can call optimism.
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
People who don't see their nature and imagine they can practice thoughtlessness all the time are lairs and fools.
Men often take their imagination for their heart; and they believe they are converted as soon as they think of being converted.
Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.
A certificate of live birth is not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination as a birth certificate.
There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feelings; but none when they are under the influence of imagination.
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night.
For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.
