...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
She was a voice with a body as afterthought, a wry smile that sailed through heavy traffic. Give her a history and she'd disappear. Eric Packer about Vija Kinski
...The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.
The idea of saving anything was folly, a life especially. No life had been truly saved, not in the history of mankind. They were merely prolonged. Everything comes to an end.
Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history that is learned.
Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.
And in that history you're trying to connect to something that once was yours - to something purer, better, something that you lost or something, maybe, that you never knew but that you feel you knew.
The bloody times, the horror, will just be history to them, words on a page, so how will they dare to judge? Very easily, I should imagine.
The greatest bloodbaths in the history of the human race were recorded in the twentieth century in countries that sought to eliminate God, worship, and faith.
And wasn't that a great moment in baseball history," Holly Grace replied with withering sarcasm. "Helen Keller pitching and Little Stevie Wonder catching.
History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps but it’s never enough. You also must run.
Even the worst humans in the history of the world didn’t grow up thinking, "I hope I slaughter an entire race of people when I’m an adult".
The history of our country has taught us, above all, the virtue of patience. It will be many generations before we can have the conditions we seek.
The Christ event did not in that sense CHANGE the will of God, but rather it more clearly expressed God's eternal will toward the whole of history.
To deal with history [life] means to abandon one's self to chaos but to retain a belief in the ordination and the meaning. It is a very serious task.
It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military manoeuvres, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of.
GWGs [girls with glasses] aren't happy being nomads; they need a safe place to put their glasses while they sleep.
The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it's the study of historians' studies. . . . Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.
Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature.
History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history...
